The Black Hole Accelerator X3

The Black Hole Accelerator X3

V Bertolaccini

First published 2015 by CB

This edition published 2016 by CB

This is a Shakespir edition 2016

Copyright Victor Bertolaccini

ISBN: 978-1-3116-7514-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner. Nor can it be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Prologue

The Gateway

The black sphere in the Particle Accelerator X3 chamber vanished behind Weaver as he hurtled out the universe!

Startled cries and last conversations of scientists swirled through his thoughts, and taunted! Surely they had not used him deliberately! He could not give a proper scientific account, if he survived, and a new probe should be found!

Explosions of radiance of powerful stars exploded through the wormhole stunning him, and he started spinning, and a colossal whirlpool of lines of light magically formed, and he studied it for a long time and realized that he had no proper bodily presence, and he slowly lost consciousness.

He came to startled and realizing that he was accelerating through the wormhole at hyper speed, and realized that streaks of light shooting passed him were powerful outer suns!

It was a gateway but there was no exit point and he could not guess what hideous place he could be thrown out! Would he be smashed into particles or disintegrated into nothing by being thrown out of something like a black hole?

How worse could the situation get? He could be trapped there for eternity wishing he had died!

A black blur emerged ahead in a central region of stars and drew his attention, and he started to recognize detail in it, as it grew and he shifted into it, and when near it he saw magnificent distant stars brightly shining in its depths.

More powerful stars appeared near him and spectacular white beams exploded out and he realized the tremendous speed that he was traveling at!

The outer universe was appearing and expanding all across his front, and he was shooting into it!

The stars were dazzling, which he could not recognize! They filled space everywhere, and he was staggered that they could even exist in their states!

A form like a black hole stretched out across space all around his front and he wondered where he was being thrown out, and something suddenly altered!

He sensed something! Something of ancient origins existed there! Its existence was all about him but he had no proper awareness of what! He perceived that he was being transported to another destination, and that something was happening before he fully entered the universe, where he would have taken human form and would have suffocated in space, and he believed that he had entered another gateway and that he was being transported away to another destination.

The gateway had been advanced into something else and he studied it shifting him around locations of space, and an explosion of movement left him stunned but still firmly believing in its safety, and he felt as though he was in something this time, and that before he had been hurtling uncontrollably through an uncontrolled gateway.

Again he felt something alter and that he had reached another far more advanced gateway, which was not as ancient and was far more advanced, and in vast leaps across the universe he was instantaneously emerged and relocated, appearing in vast strange and mind-bending star regions, emerging about him as though he were floating through them, and he studied bright glowing star constellations, and with mind-boggling powers, with an accuracy and capacity inconceivable, it located a point in the universe, and he sensed something strange, and it completed its voyage!

Part I

Particle Accelerator X3

Chapter 1

Moonbase X1

The explosion from the missile was tremendous and smashed Lucas’s space vehicle to wreckage and sent it somersaulting across the surface of the moon!

When he became conscious afterwards he was in complete darkness and felt only metal and moondust beneath his glove, and he realized that his spacesuit still had oxygen. Ever bone in his body had to be smashed by the impact or the crash afterwards and he was surely nearly dead!

The shattering tumble had surely smashed his body beyond recovery and recognition!

Whoever fired the missile and smashed the vehicle would soon check it and that he had been killed!

Whoever was after him had to be crazy beyond anyone he had ever met and out for the kill, and surely stupid for doing it at such a place! He could not visualize who was there and just accepted that they might be trying to kill him for being a leading scientist at Moonbase X1!

He remained confused at who could do it! He had not even known that there was anyone else on the moon! Someone had just destroyed an expensive American military space vehicle at a confidential hidden American moonbase!

The lifeless sky through a gap in the remains of the vehicle showed him stars and where he was trapped below the wreckage, and the strange surrounding darkness was so peculiar and empty that he was sure that death was due, and he imagined himself at the outer limits of the universe, at the most distant point!

He moved and saw the Earth and was amazed that it was actually there, at the only small gap and view of the outer universe, as though there as a reminder that he should be there instead of being on the moon, and he considered leaving there if he survived!

The pain was now little and he started wonder why, and he started to check his surroundings by feeling around him and felt objects from all over the overturned vehicle about him, and he started feeling his body and at the places where he had been hit! The spacesuit had worked and had withstood taking any damage, and there was no loss of air!

At first he thought it was exaggerated as there had to be some damage to his body, but after a short while of checking he realized that he had been lucky and had actually avoided being another victim of the moon.

He felt around where he remembered there was a small light, and he switched it on, and was surprised that the interior about him looked far different now and he took a little time examining objects about him, coming familiar with everything again.

It was odd he was alone on the moon himself in darkness!

Once he started moving about he speeded up checking his limbs for superficial damage and if he had damaged the use of his legs, and realized his body was only sore.

His survey of the vehicle showed it to be beyond repair, which he had known, but what left him staggered was there was no way to communicate with the moonbase and all the communication equipment was damaged!

Surely someone at the moonbase would check up on him and realize that something had happened to his vehicle if there was no response from it! Yet he knew what they were like there and that they might do it days later! He was miles away from the moonbase, with probably not enough oxygen left to make it back!

He had survived the impact! Yet was he better off, and would he suffer a worse death later by suffocating an agonizing death?

He quickly gathered all the stuff he needed, found a way out of the vehicle, and stood outside it staring out into the strange dark landscape, and at the planet Earth above and its bright radiance over the landscape, thinking of the things that he had intended to do if he returned home.

The sun was below the horizon and all he had was the Earth and the stars!

He moved away as fast as he could towards the moonbase and thought of it as another world! He realized that he had not actually set foot on the moon’s surface and had only been in space vehicles, and he was surprised at how different it was from being in the moonbase, and the vehicle.

It was then that he spotted another vehicle moving around and moved as fast as he could go over to some hills to hide, and moved faster when he spotted missiles on the vehicle.

A high-powered rifle blasted a rock in front of him, with no sound, and he saw the impact and the danger, as it smashed it to pieces, and he saw a rifle sticking out the vehicle.

The surprise was it had more velocity and impact there as there was no air or proper gravity, and he wondered how far the bullet could actually travel.

He dived across mounds of moondust trying to accelerate away, with the spacesuit and low gravity muddling his perspective of movement, and he wondered if the spacesuit could be made to stop a bullet. The strength of its materials was great!

He just managed to get behind a hill as the next bullet arrived.

Whoever was there had to be crazy and determined to kill him!

Surely it had to be someone from the moonbase itself?

He did not recognize the vehicle and never knew there were any missiles there, and wondered what use they would be there!

Once he got behind other hills he started finding different ways to use the low gravity and vast leaps to move fast away.

The moonbase had to be located in the most desolate place! Other countries had barely even put satellites in orbit!

He realized the deadly environment surrounding him again as he studied it. The deadly cold was far lower than anything on the Earth! It made him cringe and blindly rush on through the mind-bending landscape, almost lost, still trying to get back, even though he had to move behind hills to avoid being seen.

He looked around a hill of rocks and saw that they were moving away from him! But he knew that once they never found him and any footprints that they would return to where he had been and trace his movements in the moondust. So he deliberately made it harder for them to trace him by rushing over rock areas and changing his direction.

He knew he had finally hit the ultimate deadly scenario! He never had enough air and was using up more and more, and making it take longer to arrive at the moonbase! And surely they would know where he was heading, and even find some place to wait on him!

He could not even imagine having found a way out of getting out of such a predicament! If he had remained in the vehicle he would have ran out of air.

He increased the brightness of his spacesuit light, avoiding the larger bright light, to see what there was about him, and saw little that he never saw before!

What did these people want? Should he hand himself over to them? Surely they might just keep him as a prisoner? He could offer to give information about the confidential moonbase!

Away behind him he saw some form of explosion blast out from a missile, and knew that they had started following his trail, and he decided to do a form of leaping and jogging to accelerate him forward, as it was all he could do!

Once he started to get tired he started to see the mistake in it, and thought of surrendering, and he suddenly had an idea!

Why could he not attack their vehicle? He knew where they would go and could ambush them! Yet he never had any weapons or anything to do anything.

Yet he was sure he could get on the vehicle without being seen, and there was no sound there!

He recalled a place further back where he had seen two large hills with a small lane between them where he could hide and make it onto the back of the vehicle. So he rushed away over to his side where the other side of the hills was, where he could rush there, and they would not see his prints returning there.

Just carrying it out and thinking of handling the problem sent adrenalin rushing through his veins and he increased his speed, and he was soon rushing along behind the hills, over small rocks on the ground, and he started to examine the rocks on the ground and realized that he had not left any prints that showed where he was going there, and he entered the canyon considering finding a hiding place on the hills.

As he rushed through the canyon he started to examine the rocks and realized that the small rocks on the ground had been cut and that they looked artificially cut and he wondered who would want to do anything there, and what had they had been doing there? What could they be possibly have been doing away out there? Unless it was mining! Or it had been done before the moonbase had been built!

His mind raced through what had occurred and he tried to discover why! For some reason he only realized that the location that he drove into had been a region that nobody at the moonbase went in, and he started to wonder what was there! Was there something hidden away there? And why had they not just found a way to stop him? Instead of destroying an expensive space vehicle, which had a limited quantity!

Why would they go to such lengths to kill him? What could possibly be there? What could be there in such a desolate place?

When he finally ignored it all and left it until later when he found something buried away under rocks in an area at his side, and removed rocks and revealed a metal grid cover, where he saw some moondust starting to be blown up, and he grabbed a handful of dust and threw it over it and was surprised at the power of the flow and the dust blowing away up above him.

He was sure it was air and that something below was blasting vast amounts of it up, and he stood pondering what could be there!

He eventually lifted the metal cover and found a vast tunnel going straight down deep into the moon below, which had clearly been hollowed out with some large powerful machine, which he had not seen there before. Yet he had not checked everything at the moonbase, or how it had been constructed!

He started to see away out of being caught by the vehicle, and having to attack it and at the most stopping it from following him, as they surely had weapons aboard to handle being attacked and he was positive that he now never had enough oxygen to make it back to the moonbase.

Yet who had dug such a tunnel? He then wondered if it belonged to a foreign country that intended to monitor and perhaps destroy the secret research/military station in a distant future war!

With his light turned up he grabbed at its metal ladder going down into the metal pipe tunnel and he rushed into it and swiftly covered the lid over the top, with a pile of rocks and stones that he put over the top, and he slightly shook it and made sure it was covered over above him.

He realized that he could easily climb down, and he started to investigate it, while avoiding being killed! He was sure it had been put there for a reason and that something was just below him! If he could stay there long enough without using up anymore air.

He was positive that the men could not trace him there as he never left footprints leading there, as well as before he had entered the canyon going through the hills, and they would not find him.

Surely they would guard the area around the moonbase for a long time until they knew he definitely had no air supply left and consider him dead!

He swiftly aimed his light downwards and started climbing downwards, as he considered what would be below.

Sounds and echoes mingled through the hollow metal tunnel, going through the blowing air, which grew denser the lower he climbed, and he realized how he missed outer sounds.

The wind below gave haunting whistles and he eventually realized that there was enough air around him to remove his spacesuit helmet and he removed it slowly testing the air and seeing if it was alright and dense enough for him to breathe, with him ready to shove the helmet back on, and he finally with satisfaction turned off the air in his spacesuit and rested.

The air smelt strange and he could not recognize what it was, and he wondered why they had so much of it and were allowing it to blow out, and he pondered what could be below. The depth had to be great as he could not even see the bottom and he had shifted down a large distance.

He was stunned at the dangers that he had been through and realized that he would have to leave the moon and return home, and if they never found the men in the vehicle or proved that they existed they would know that he knew about them and would surely still want him killed, and he wondered what was there that they wanted him dead for!

He had to warn the others about the danger! They were too deadly! They had destroyed an entire space vehicle with a powerful military missile! How would they handle them back at the moonbase if they heard about it and discovered where they were? Would they even be able to handle them? He was not sure the moonbase was designed and had the weapons to carry out anything against them!

No matter how he tried to shake it off and contemplate their identities his thoughts never formed stable recognitions as he had not seen them! And he had little on what was below him and he continued downwards wondering if he had enough air to return to the moonbase and if there was somewhere below where he could increase his air supply!

An area of the tunnel had cracked from something! Perhaps from moonquakes? And he stopped to examine the area where part of the metal tunnel had fallen downwards and left the rock behind it visible, and he examined it with interest, and was amazed at it being different from Earth stone. He pondered what people who knew him would think of it and him being on the moon! None of them even knew of the secret moonbase!

Dust fell down and blew upwards and swirled up and through the beams from his light and his shadow and he continued to climb down, edging down to some unknown destination and future, seeking to discover what was below and how to survive.

He realized that he had avoided being killed after all and wondered if he was going to be killed later, especially when he climbed back out and went outside.

He moved down fast, realizing the mistake he could be making and what could be below, and thought of the trouble he could have getting back to the surface and trying to find the moonbase on the dark strange surface.

He examined how the tunnel had been built with some interest, while glimpsing parts of the shaft above, and was surprised again at how long and expensive what was there must be.

He had always wanted to investigate some great mystery and it had even been one of the reasons he had been in the moon vehicle and was exploring the unexplored region! It had helped lead him into becoming a scientist and to go to such far out desolate locations, and he wanted to explore more. He had wanted to explore and discover new things of value and greatness, and perhaps even be remembered!

What interested him the most was why they had gone to such lengths to kill him, and what the tunnel was doing out there!

What treasures could be hidden away in such regions of the moon, with it being so not properly explored?

What was he dealing with though? Why were they trying to kill him? Were they protecting something that they had hidden?

Something of unfathomable unidentifiable nature was there and he could not grasp it no matter how hard he tried! As nothing he knew was good enough to explain it!

As he lowered himself progressively down he started to realize the depth of it and wondered what the hell he was letting himself in for! He had hardly been out of the moonbase, and had been only fulfilling his fantasy of being on the moon and exploring it, and going by what all the other scientists said and what he saw nobody really went outside! There was no real need, and no real work was required there.

Being on other worlds fascinated him and he wondered what mysteries were hidden out there! They had hardly explored any of the moon and they acted like the whole lot had been checked! His arrival there had been incredible as he had watched the space vehicle landing and the moon surface stretching out.

He was fascinated in its interior and wondered if hollow regions existed in its interior, as he was sure the actual gravity being so low would allow it, and he was sure that they had actually mentioned that the moon’s gravity was lower than it should have been and that it had not been properly checked until it had been landed on, and he believed the only thing that could properly account for it was a large hollow region or regions in it!

There was something not right! Something secretively had been built there and he could not realize why, and why it was being covered up, and he considered if it was the Russian scientists there and the people in the vehicle.

He realized the implications of the discovery and if he was trapped there, and wondered what was below. He had to check what was there, no matter what! He could not let it go, and he had to survive and give the information.

The temperature of the warm air rising increased as he got lower and he wondered what could produce it and how much fuel would be wasted generating it, and how little they used at the moonbase, and wondered how much fuel they would have to bring in to supply it! But they would probably use atomic fuel to power it! But why did they need so much?

The tunnel was incredibly and uniquely drilled and fitted with a metal pipe and made with incredible precision and he knew it had to belong something advanced. What he could not work out was what could be built out there!

He realized again that Moonbase X1 might use underground volcanic activity for a power supply, and heat and air supply, which would explain the vast amounts of warm air below him.

He had not been able to properly explore the moonbase and lower regions because much of it needed a higher confidential clearance, and he had only a lower confidential clearance!

If there was underground volcanic activity there it was an ultimate idea for permanently living there! It would supply everything that they needed! In fact all they needed was water to do that anyway!

He gripped the metal ladder hard and rested and fixed his boot and looked up to the top of the tunnel and saw darkness there now, and looked and listened to what was there, and wondered what would happen if he was caught there.

He considered taking off his spacesuit so he could climb down better, but he would then have to carry it down, and he considered throwing it down the tunnel in a large ball and getting it at the bottom but he could not risk damaging it or allowing it to give him away until he found who or what was there.

A silent thud echoed up from below and eventually he looked down trying to grasp something, and considered putting his light out, but he saw that it was a freak air gust moving something below and tried to guess the distance to where if had come.

When the bottom appeared he stopped and stared in wonder and considered what was in the deep blackness, and considered the incredible trouble he would have climbing out.

He was mainly confused at what would be there and wondered how long his light would last! Its radiance was about the same and he realized how tired his legs had become, with climbing down and running from being killed above!

What would the outcome of it be? Would he even find anything? What could be there? It could have belonged to earlier scientists, checking for something? The moonbase was old and a great deal of research had originally been done on the moon there!

Hazy echoes off his deep breathing broke the extraordinary silence and he examined below as he shifted downwards, and he started to find the warm air getting warmer and he frequently stopped to gasp for air, while dangling about with hideous expectations of plunging into danger!

A distant upper rumble of something blowing air out became hearable and he realized how dangerous the place might become if he met anyone below, and he was left confused!

When he reached the bottom he was too busy focusing on getting there fast to see anything other than the metal floor, and he only looked around when he had got off the metal ladder!

All around him metal tunnels were moving air about, as part of an air system for some sort of underground moonbase and he heard something nearby powerfully blowing out air in one of the tunnels, and he wondered if the ventilation system of Moonbase X1 was the same!

He started crawling along the tunnel, where he had heard something nearby powerfully blowing out air, and he came to a ventilation opening where he saw a room through and he looked for people but never saw anyone or anything!

He continued searching the tunnel and eventually came to an immense place where the air was being produced from a water supply and he realized that they had an underground water supply after all, and boiling water from underground volcanic activity.

He realized that they could be heating ice below and extracting the hot water! But he was sure hot magma was heating the water and they were pumping it out, and he realized why they might have chosen there for a moonbase.

He moved along and entered another tunnel and came to a very large ventilation opening supplying an immense dim structure that he was sure had something, and after seeing that there was nobody about and that it looked like they had not been there for a long time he decided investigate it and carefully removed the cover and climbed out.

In the dim light he saw an immense hall and finally saw a large artificial black object resting in the center, which vanished in the distance, into darkness, and he gasped and examined what he could properly see, and tried to see the roof a hundred feet overhead, and it going higher further in, and he gasped again and wondered what hell he was looking at!

How had they managed to get such a large object and large expensive equipment onto the moon and down to the structure?

They had to have another way into the chamber to bring it in and he realized that he could get out there more easily!

He explored and discovered immense amounts of highly advanced equipment and he examined controls and realized how new most of it was, and he traced cables from it to more equipment and massive lights!

It all seemed centered around and monitoring the immense strange black object at the center of it all. He activated lights and when they brightened the place he was staggered and nearly fell!

The cavity was immense and went into darkness in the distance, but what really staggered him was the immensity of the black object at its center and that it resembled an immense black submarine and he was sure it was a weapon! It was strange as it had no openings and was solid! Yet he believed it was some form of spacecraft or space weapon!

He was staggered and exhausted and could not fully understand what it was as there was not enough proof! They surely could not have put it there? They had to have vast amounts of men and vehicles to build it!

How could anyone have been able to hide and carry out such an operation without being noticed?

He realized that the moonbase could have been built before the other moonbase had been constructed and that it could well have been a hidden part of it at one time! There could be an underground connection! They could get most of their water and air from there! Whatever it was it had to have been even more secretive than it!

It staggered him when he thought of the nature of the moonbase! The place could have been built for atomic warfare!

Could it be an ultimate atomic weapon and doomsday device?

He realized the danger that he was in and he had to get out, and would have to leave fast! It was far too dangerous and he considered if he should have it investigated!

While he wandered up to the deadly black object he wondered how the thing could even lift off! The power behind it had to be colossal and new and highly confidential!

He quickly returned to where he had been and did his best to cover up all the signs that he had been there.

He soon found a small vehicle and sat in it and got ready to drive away. He was amazed at his original thoughts of what was there! It did not add up! What the hell was it doing there?

He scarcely even grasped why the moonbase was situated there! The moon was not near anything! Surely America had enough land and hidden places where it could be hidden? Why was it located away out there where anything could happen!

He shifted the vehicle away slowly getting use to using it while examining the black object and its immense shape, but never saw anything on or in it, or marks of anything, which would have shown it had been welded or had been somehow fitted together!

When he stopped to feel its surface he was surprised that it was some new unknown substance!

There had to be a way into it or something, and he raced along its side gasping at the immensity of it. Now amazed that there was nobody looking after it! How could it have been so hidden away?

The structure was like a gigantic torpedo, and when he reached the furthest point he realized that it was at least quarter of a mile long, and he was astonished!

Was it of military origins? It could have its looks to camouflage the technology and confuse observers? Whatever it was the cost and time behind it proved that it could take warfare to a new level!

An eerie sensation gripped him! Something was not right! He sensed something weird, which he could not recognize!

He found a computer and examined information, looking for answers, and he watched something voyaging through stars, exploring vast unexplored stars, and he realized it was an alien voyager, which had a new form of propulsion, with mind-boggling technology and powers, and had a capacity inconceivable, and was built to travel in deep space!

Chapter 2

The Secret Moon Mission

For a moment Weaver thought of them crashing or confronting a deadly scenario! The environment, in and about the space vehicle, was so peculiar he was unsure of anything though, but he had a strange feeling of there being great danger from something!

The military spacecraft descended to Moonbase X1 and the soldiers aboard checked their spacesuits and oxygen supplies, and received updates for their mission from Commander Craven.

Weaver gasped as he looked down at the moon surface and considered what lurked ahead, and the amount of danger he was being put in. Ever since the ice station incident had taken place it seemed like he had a curse put on him, which was them involving him in every deadly incidence about, as they had realized he was now the intelligence agent to do the job and handle the worst occurrences the best! It was a hideous conclusion that he had not accepted could occur! He expected to be promoted or be put in more advanced situations!

All the soldiers who had taken part in the ice station mission had been put on this mission! He gasped again at what had occurred there! Certain things that had occurred interested him greatly though!

None of them had even heard of the secret moonbase, and it had taken some time before they revealed anything of the secret mission details, and they had hardly received anything, and, in fact, they had not fully accepted that they were going to the moon from a secret launch site until they had been put in the space vehicle on the rocket.

There was more action than he could believe! What were the events that they were on the trail of? Were they being intentionally secretive or covering not knowing things enough themselves? What had he let himself in for?

He was to masquerade as one of the soldiers being put in the moonbase and basically find out what was happening there without getting caught, and to take any action if needed!

Sunlight in space blasted through one of the windows blinding them with its intensity in space. The conditions outside were incredible and he never thought that he would confront anything worse than the Antarctic! And he gasped at the temperatures recorded there and at the fact they were above the moon, and alone and away from the Earth! Now and then he had glimpsed the Earth behind them with amazement! It looked far different than described and shown, especially in orbit! He also expected it be slightly flattened at the top and bottom, and it seemed a perfect sphere to him!

So when they finally started landing on the moon, with the rockets blasting out slowing their fall, he was not surprised to see the pilots react and report that there was something wrong!

Weaver automatically gritted his teeth and got ready for what was about to occur!

The moon was large and the landscape startled him, and he could still hardly believe the location below was there, and that he would be trapped there without help if anything happened!

He realized that they had made a mistake already! They had been too keen to enter the mission and they had dropped down a greater distance away from the moonbase than they should have! And he could not even see it and only recognized it from the secret intelligence photos of the highly confidential underground Moonbase X1, buried beneath the lunar dust.

They had given him little and he knew they had little to give! Basically they had little of what was happening and he was to get information and help the soldiers with their work.

He discovered little in what he had been told and really only knew that there were mysterious deaths occurring on the moonbase, and most had been killed by military weapons, and space vehicles destroyed by missiles, and a man named Lucas had vanished on the lunar surface, which was the official reason why the soldiers were sent in to stop, and he was put there by intelligence agencies to find out more.

Nothing added up! Who wanted to kill anyone at such a place? It was basically a military and scientist research moonbase and he could only think that another country was behind it! Yet who had done it and why? There were no known cases like it on record!

Who could profit from it? They clearly would replace the people killed, and what good would it do them? There had to be far more behind it! Surely countries would profit little from it!

He gazed over at where the underground moonbase was embedded in the gray dust and rock with sunlight gleaming over it. The case was important and something had to have occurred!

He recalled the size of it below the ground as he watched the others and was surprised when they announced that they had to land manually on an area below, and that they would have to walk over to it, and he wondered how dangerous it could be!

While it went down he grasped the full dangers and emptiness of walking on the moon, and as they landed he felt a thud and something break on the space vehicle and he rested and considered his chances of survival and gasped!

Chapter 3

The Moon Battle

Sunlight exploded out blinding Weaver when he looked directly at the naked sun resting above the lunar landscape, and he studied the bright moon landscape while trying to explain why he had taken such a risky mission, especially after the last!

The entire mission could not have been planned and he sensed that they could not have avoided what had happened!

The moonbase was further away than they anticipated and the moondust was deep in the region they were in, and virtually impossible to get quickly through! He wondered what the place would be like if they had landed there when the sun had been below the horizon. The incident with the spacecraft not landing at the moonbase showed that someone there was against them and perhaps the mission, and he wondered who had access to the vehicle or if they had altered the vehicle’s computer from somewhere else!

When a bullet hit and killed one of the front soldiers, beside him, Weaver was surprised, and realized that someone was directly attacking them on the moon surface!

It was strange as none of them seemed to have the slightest experience of handling such an experience in such a place! The low gravity and large spacesuits hindered their movements and they never had enough experience of moving there properly!

They were lucky there were some small piles of rock to hide behind to the side of them, and they rushed below them as bullets flew into the moondust about them. They were too far away from the moonbase and they never even knew how long it would take them to reach there. The bullets seemed to be off their targets and he was sure they had been unable to fire their weapons properly wearing the spacesuits! The gloves and helmet were hideous and he wondered what the outcome of such a battle would be!

None of them could see who was there and they were hidden at different locations and never moved around, and they were unable to recognize anything about them! It was like an alien world!

Were the gunmen professionals and had planned the whole thing well before they had arrived?

The whole terrain was unfamiliar too everyone and they had the advantage over them! How could they move forward and get to the moonbase without receiving many deaths? And they could not move back as the spacecraft had left and their air supplies would soon run out! They would have to move forward at some point, no matter what!

The temperature there was incredibly low and he considered what would happen if his body came into contact with the outside vacuum, and if it had the effect people had claimed, as he had not heard any accounts of it occurring, and he wondered if the temperature really was as low as claimed and what the effect of that would be.

There was a temperature reading in his spacesuit for inside his spacesuit but nothing for outside it.

It was lucky the place had not been far further! The place was hidden away! It was lucky they had seen it from above and knew the direction.

He even wondered if it was the people from the moonbase actually firing on them! If they had not known of their arrival and the situation there was worse than stated they could believe that they were being attacked!

He considered the most desolate regions he had ever been in, and he even thought there was something missing there that existed on the world. The stars were incredible in space and he watched the bare universe around him, and wondered if there would be any strange sightings.

What was staggering was their enemy was taking on so many professional soldiers! What did they actually intend to do? They surely could not expect to kill the entire group and if they had been informed about them they would have realized how trained they were! Could they be trying to scare them away? It was absurd also as they would have to go there! There was nowhere else out there they could stay, and they surely could get caught!

The mission now seemed flawed! Weaver copied the soldiers about him and started shooting away at them in an attempt to get them to move or do something!

They had a good team of everyone needed to carry out the mission and handle what they could and if they had landed next to the moonbase as planned nothing would have gone wrong!

He wondered if it had been someone on the plane who had landed them there after all?

At times he still could not believe that there was anything out in such a desolate region, and that anything existed there!

They were shrouded in moondust, and he realized again that they would have to go forward. And he considered if they would find his remains there one day, frozen and in an unaltered condition, and end up in a museum.

The gray landscape was untouched by water or life everywhere, and empty and hollow with no sound, and had a deep haunting silence in its environment that went further than any desolate snow landscapes. He was on another world! An empty lost world lost in the depths of space, absent of life, and a dieing world.

What was shocking was how easily they had trapped them?

Could they avoid a large amount of deaths? There was nothing to recognize anywhere, and he watched some of the men attempt to use communication devices to the moonbase to get a vehicle there fast, but they failed and just tried to see if there was anything to pick up on it anywhere!

Another problem was that they had experienced a long sleepy flight and had got easily exhausted wading through the deep dust with the large spacesuits!

It was no surprise that Commander Craven eventually grew angry and made them blast them with as many well aimed rounds to force some form of reaction, but they seemed to ignore it, and he knew that they would have to hit them with something!

“What are we going to do …?” one of men finally spluttered through his spacesuit communicator, fighting for air, furious that they had been put in such a situation!

“We better agree to something …” Commander Craven shouted back, giving glances about, realizing the mess of his expedition so far, and decided not to continue.

“We’ve put our foot in it again!” Reeves continued, who was near Weaver, who had become the closest and most trusted person to Weaver.

“We’ll have to do something!” Weaver forced himself to reply, and watched Commander Craven gasp.

Weaver was surprised that they all agreed with it and that they would prefer to die there than die of suffocation!

Deep down Weaver really wanted to know who was there, and capture one and question him.

They all agreed on a plan of action and started fixing themselves up and preparing themselves, and he watched their blank faces examining everything in the distance and at the point where the gunmen were.

They all rushed out and sneaked along covered regions that they would be unseen in, with their guns ready for heavy action!

Weaver wondered why they had stopped firing anyway in amazement! Then when they moved swiftly close to them he realized they had seen them coming and had decided to retreat fast in a sideways direction, and he thought of chasing one but it was useless and the spacesuits and low gravity were too hard to use without training.

They were also well armed and capable of killing them and he was sure that they had heavier weapons available! How could they attack and win with them being so heavily armed without making major losses? Then as they properly examined the area around where they had been he realized that they had been capable of attacking them easier from there!

He just knew something would have stopped him getting any information from the gunmen if they had captured any of them!

He thought of the death of the soldier near him and how ruthlessly they had attacked! He had never fully realized how desolate, deadly, and beyond civilization the moon was, and how far from help it was! If anything serous happened they could not get help no matter what! He wondered if a war took place there if they could handle it!

Now all they needed to do was to get to the moonbase fast before their air ran out, and as they reached the moonbase he began wondering why none of their footsteps led to or came from the moonbase!

Chapter 4

The Secret Moonbase

The moonbase was concealed deep underground and they found the tunnel with the entrance, and a soldier used a communicator at the side of the entrance to announce their arrival.

Weaver was bewildered and wondered how they managed to survive there! Surely the air alone would be tremendous and take vast space vehicles to bring in!

It was incredibly camouflaged and looked like part of the landscape, and he realized there must be other entrances to bring in vehicles and far larger objects, and perhaps at where vehicles might be kept.

Commander Craven identified himself and they sent out some soldiers to get them. Weaver realized that they were very precautious, and wondered why they had not described the mysterious deaths there as being the gunmen! And he wondered if they were actually at war with each other for some reason that they had not mentioned and that they had made it confidential!

Weaver recalled and realized one main point and that might prove that some of the gunmen had to have been in the base or have someone in it working for them, as deaths were reported as occurring in it, and he thought that it could be a major clue to finding them!

The entrance was slowly opened by soldiers in spacesuits who identified them and took them in and into a large air chamber where they stayed until air filled it, and they finally removed their spacesuits and marched in through a long corridor going downwards, wondering what it would be like.

As Weaver moved in at the front he saw that there was far more powerful lighting further in and he felt delighted that he would soon be able to rest and be inside and away from the severe conditions, and actually be doing his job that he was there for!

He wondered what they did there and were like in such conditions, and what peculiarities they must have with being in such a place, as he had seen elsewhere, and he wondered what effects the very low gravity had. Was it the same as being in space, and on space stations, and did they normally have to return to the Earth and proper gravity after six month, or was it longer?

He enjoyed exploring hidden places, and basically the unknown and unexplored, and he examined long corridors, untouched rooms, looking for evidence of anything.

He wondered what it would have been like to be one of the first there, and humans to visit other worlds! What would it actually be like? What would be the big surprises? Could they grow food and create and find all their needs?

He wondered if they had a water source at the moonbase, as it could mean the survival of the moonbase in the end, as the cost of it could accumulate!

What magnificent wonders would exist there? Would people eventually start building more and more structures instead?

A main corridor went out to at least a fifth of a mile with corridors and rooms going along it, and at the end of it stairs going downwards to other floors.

They clearly had found a way to build it with the least amount of materials!

Weaver realized how hard it would be to solve what was occurring and that there was far more people there than they had estimated, and he realized that the plans that he had seen of it had been wrong for some reason, and he wondered how they managed to get so many people there and have enough supplies!

He sensed hidden dangers and mysteries existed there and confirmed it from what some of the scientists they met said! The moonbase soldiers were far different from them, and had been clearly chosen for many different reasons! They were glad to see them and have help arrive, and he did believe that they believed that they could be killed there!

They were finally taken along a corridor to their sleeping accommodations and Weaver took a room next to Commander Craven and Reeves took one next to him, where they unpacked their stuff, and Weaver was happy to see that it had electricity and heating and other needs, and he visualized he was on a strange version of the Earth.

The low gravity was extraordinary and he wondered how much damage constant low gravity would have!

Later when he had something to eat in the dinner room some of the scientists started arguing with each other about things he could not grasp, and they only just stopped themselves mentioning things that were confidential!

Many things continued to confuse him and he could not get what they were all actually working on there! What were they doing out there in such a desolate region and in so many numbers? Surely the location had been explored by now? The cost was tremendous for keeping it there! There were no indications of anything! Yet he kept getting suggests of a tremendous confidential project of incredible value that most of them were working on!

Yet were they just funding vast amounts of useless and expensive science research, stopping the place from being closed?

Though they could be supplying valuable information on vast amounts of things for many sources, as well as looking after the military moonbase, and the tremendous top secret project they kept suggesting could be a highly confidential military project!

Chapter 5

The Investigation

After they had discussions with the military commander of the moonbase Weaver realized that they were going to give them little information on anything, and for his investigations for his intelligence mission, and it had him all over the place meeting different people, and he continuously grasped suggestions of things, which never added up, and he was sure he was being denied access to something dangerous!

Something was being hidden away and they were all united and avoiding them, and some even showed deep fear of something, which he never actually grasped! Were people being killed for saying too much? If so he may be able to find one of them!

He entered many laboratories and drank with many of the scientists and tried to work out what they were working on, but they normally avoided telling him what they were doing.

He started to believe that there were scientists there that knew something that would tell him and he decided to find a way to find them and get them to tell him what he wanted!

He eventually started to realize many things that the scientists never mentioned, and he realized one and that the lower floors were never mentioned, and they avoided taking him there, and he decided he had to go there and see what was there for himself.

When he arrived at the bottom floor he found two security guards outside the entrance door and they stopped him entering, and told him that he needed special security clearance.

Weaver sensed that they never guarded the door all the time and believed that they would stop for a lunch break as they all stopped work above at the same time, so he waited until he believed they were away having lunch and checked from a hidden region on the stairs and saw that they were away and rushed down the stairs and entered the door and found a long empty corridor, realizing that they had not even attempted to lock it.

He entered further into it and looked into empty rooms, wondering what they were up to, and all he saw was empty laboratories, and he examined one in detail, looking for clues of anything, and found documents mentioning particles and particle research and photographed them with a miniature camera.

The bottom floor was differently designed for some reason and mysterious things there kept him intrigued!

Perhaps it had hidden military secrets and he wondered what kind of secret weapons they could have discovered, which might not have been revealed to the world, and he wondered what the whole structure might have originally been like when built, and he realized the implications of them going out there on the moon and that it could be some of their most highly confidential stuff, and he even considered leaving it as he might do damage. If they were not doing any damage!

While approaching a corridor at his front side a white shape appeared and he saw a scientist in a white laboratory jacket marching out, and he muttered something and ignored him, and marched off towards where Weaver had come from, and to the stairs going up to the top floors, and he wondered if he would tell on him and shrugged and watched the scientist leave, and he wondered what he had been up to as he saw that he clearly had been actively working on something.

The incident and scientist’s appearance stuck in his thoughts and he tried to grasp some clue and something that he had missed that he could not realize!

In the end he just went to where he came from and rushed along the corridor.

What the hell were they up to? This case was really fascinating him! There were things that did not add up and make sense everywhere, and he could not think of any equivalence! He had never even heard of anything taking place in space, and the normal cases were nothing compared to this one!

He swiftly moved through the corridor wondering where it went and what the use was of having so many laboratory rooms, and he wished that he had informed someone where he had gone, and he made sure his handgun was ready.

The cost of it proved that if there was something there it would have value!

He remained silent and wandered along the corridor in the one direction, going away out from the upper floors of the moonbase, and he realized that he was in the interior of the moon and going directly under craters above, and he found the entrance to an elevator at the end of the corridor and entered it.

When it reached the bottom and the doors opened all he could do was gasp as a colossal dimly lit tunnel appeared! At first it resembled a giant road with an immense pipe structure running through it, and he moved up close and saw that it was a particle accelerator, and its detail became more clear and he studied it and was staggered at its complexity!

He was unfamiliar with particle accelerators but saw its size and that it was far more advanced and clearly for some other purpose than the normal versions that he had seen!

What it was doing there astounded him, and he was surprised that they had surprised him and he realized how he had underestimated them and wondered why!

Why had it been built there and why was it so secretive? As far as he knew there were no real problems concerned with particle accelerators, and he wondered if they were creating some new form of atomic bomb or something far more powerful that they had discovered!

He followed the tunnel along staggered and wondered what all the deaths were about, and what the soldiers were doing outside! Were they trying to stop them telling on them about something?

Chapter 6

The Time Warp

The research center Weaver rushed into was so colossal and mind-bending it left him dazed and he entirely forgot about not giving away his presence!

The particle accelerator tunnel went around in a circle and led into there, the central region, where there was an immense sphere chamber, with a frontal region of translucent material, which had in its interior a colossal translucent black hole type form blasting wildly about itself, within the chamber.

A powerful magnetic field in the chamber was clearly suspending it, but not firmly as it shifted wildly about itself, and Weaver examined a group of scientists standing about the front of it, and he studied their blank faces and tried to grasp what they were thinking and studying.

Many other scientists were in laboratories behind them at monitors and equipment checking the results being showed, and Weaver analyzed inside the chamber and followed all the glares of the scientists to a metallic gleam of light being magically suspended, motionlessly in mid-air, from the surface of an electronic clock.

At first he believed it had to be a black hole but he knew it was something else, and gasped and realized particle accelerators could actually create such occurrences!

As he edged further in he saw how colossal a laboratory was further in and that hundreds of scientists were working there and his opinion changed, as they were surely not what he thought!

He recognized some of the scientists and listened to them intensely but all they gave him was that they were carrying out a series of basic experiments.

The shudders of objects to the sphere’s tremendous force gave him shudders and he watched the power of it, like it could destroy anything put against it, and he watched the scientists in the outer laboratory and started to notice their reactions to the dangers and that they were keeping away from it, and he was sure it was more recently discovered or altered in some way than he had realized!

The antics of some scientists captivated him more and more – mystifying him with the depth of their nervousness and fear of something! Many repetitively studied controls of laboratory equipment, and he realized that they were intending to do something, at some point!

None of them explained what it was or how it was formed and he believed that they would have discovered many other unknown things of interest.

An audience formed in the outer room that baffled him when they gave loud accounts on the discovery of something, which for some reason they all avoided saying anything directly about.

Many of the scientists were famous and the atmosphere was unbelievable, and as though the audience was waiting for something unbelievable and dangerous to occur!

He sensed that most at least accepted him as being one of them, and he felt a shiver run through him as he sensed again something was going to occur! The thing looked entirely deadly and pulsating with energy, and looked and sounded on the brink of something!

One outsider scientist looked the most confused and sat in a seat behind him examining everything, considering what had happened and was occurring, and perhaps why they had not told them much.

Weaver at times spotted what looked like the shape of something inside it, and after along time of carefully examinations he was unable to see anything.

It looked powerful and deadly! The new scientists there had surely learned new information from them and looked as if they were considering things.

It looked like some form of freak show at angles, with strange lighting there.

He watched some scientists and technicians bringing in equipment and arranging it around the front of the bubble, and he wondered what the hell they were doing and dealing with, and for a moment thought he saw the sphere shift.

The scientists went to the edge of the chamber and entered a highly advanced clock near the black hole object’s field and the scientists reacted immediately when they noticed results and concluded that its precision digital numbers were being frozen, and it altered into strange forms as the clock was shifted slightly inwards, and they studied suspended partially transparent layers of it created by it, and most of the audience watched the phenomenon with amazement.

Many scientists sat astounded and some filmed it and what might be an incredible historic occurrence and a discovery that might prove time travel existed and that might finally fully prove what it was!

The scientists occasionally gave detailed explanations of what they were doing and believed was really occurring and one finally explained its formation and Weaver listened intensely, and he explained that particle accelerators on the Earth had for decades been confined to lower velocities until the invention of antigravity, artificial gravity, and forces that had been able to accelerate particles to incredible velocities, but their antigravity and forces had not been enough as the antigravity never fully eradicated the effect of gravity, and they used particle accelerators on the moon where it was able to work properly and eradicate the far lower gravity acting on it, and the particle accelerator had finally been made to increase particles to accelerations many times the velocity of light, and they had finally formed a time warp, with an intense magnetic field.

Weaver learned that they had been unsuccessful in opening a gateway like a time machine and that they had only been able to send things into the near future through it and that they were still working on many projects.

The clock edged into the confines of the warp bubble created magnificent optical effects with the clock, making it distort in twisted forms, deliberately designed for their stage performance.

Weaver realized the implications of it though and that it was far dangerous than he had imagined, as if they managed to create a proper time machine, as they suggested, they could go about altering events throughout time, and he realized they could do anything to anyone with it and even stop or alter the modern world’s existence by eliminating key events!

New leading scientists were allowed to investigate it and they crowded around it loudly discussing it, and they applauded it and announced it was the first discover of a form of time travel found.

Most of the people watched on in wonder, and many watched on wondering what the hell it was, as it was far more different than he had thought!

It looked as if it was rupturing the fabric of space and played with time, with properties of altering and suspending it, yet they fully explained that it was not a rupture in space itself and that they had made a warp in time!

Many of leading scientists talked about working with it and carrying out numerous basic and complex experiments with all the equipment available to them, and they showed detailed information had been accumulated, but most was not currently available to them, and it left the other scientists and him wondering what else they had!

Their abnormal antics at times were captivating, mystifying him with the depth of their fears of something else, and he had not seen scientists such as them actually react about anything such as it without there being something tremendously deadly!

Chapter 7

The Moonbase Bar

Strange space art and rocket models about him vaguely captured his attention in the moonbase bar, and Weaver enjoyed drinks and enjoyed the low gravity effect with it, and he watched Reeves at the other side of a table drinking fast and laughing with another soldier beside him, and more of the soldiers arrived at the bar.

It was incredible he had become a major individual in the group of scientists at the underground particle accelerator and they had gone out their way to keep in with him when they had discovered that he was an intelligence agent, and why he was put there!

Even though his cover was blown it was not entirely blown as only major scientists there knew it and he was positive they would not do anything! They had been the ones that had contacted the military and intelligence agencies, and they had been so high-ranking and connected that they had him investigated and they had given them what they wanted!

He had realized more about what he was doing there and that they had contacted them about the missing scientists and the gunmen outside the moonbase. He had given them his word that he would not deliberately give anything away he should not, and that had been good enough! He was capable of making mistakes there though, and he could not imagine how they could keep the particle accelerator confidential! The place was immense and the amount of scientists that they had allowed there were far more and far varied than there should be there!

Even though he had cleaned up a few mysteries he still had many left! He still could not work out what the time warp would end up like when they had finished advancing it! What could a time gateway do? It fascinated him! If they created a time machine what would happen?

He wondered if it was the worst discovery he had encountered, and what damage it could do to him?

Yet it had to be exaggerated, and he wondered if it was actually possible to travel back in time! What damage could they do if they only traveled into the future, and could not travel back? It would be useless as far as he was concerned! They could do something like that by finding a way of freezing people and defrosting them, and keeping them in some form of suspended animation!

There was something else he could not grasp, and he kept going over everything trying to discover. Yet he was sure that the information had not been given to him, and he ignored it!

He then wondered if it was possible to build a particle accelerator in space! Why did they have to be so large? Especially if they built only the tunnel and main components!

He also noticed that they had mentioned that they had a form of antigravity, but was that far more dangerous? They could build unbelievable weapons, and why could they not find a way of creating full antigravity?

Yet it only reduced the gravity by a certain amount! Yet they could enter immense loads into space using it! And he realized that could be how they managed to move such immense loads over to the moonbase!

He wondered if aliens were involved, and recalled the voyager at Ice Station X1! Had they detected something else from outer space and were trying to cover it up? Or perhaps the technology behind the particle accelerator was from there and it was far more highly secretive!

Weaver watched all the people in the moonbase bar and the different ways they reacted to the lower gravity, and felt light headed from it and the drink!

He left it again, and saw he needed more intelligence, and he realized he might be able to get in with one of the Russian scientists that were there! He had been brought up believing Russian agents were the main potential enemy and he kept considering them responsible for such occurrences as spying and taking of secret intelligence and technology!

He kept wondering why he never had memories of having such a situation! He was actually on the moon, and even though years before he had considered them building moonbases and had wondered why they had not gone through with it with confusion, he had been greatly surprised at how far they had actually gone and that they had managed to keep it all confidential!

There was something far more unique about this case! Everything he had been confronted with was new! They were all connected, and he did not know what to do! Surely something must exist for him to grasp the big picture? If he could get what was connecting everything? There was something missing out of the puzzle he needed to solve things and grasp what was there!

While they sat there the soldiers drank more and it seemed to increase, and he recalled that many of them at the ice station seemed to drink more.

A solider started questioning Weaver about where he had been, when Weaver had been down investigating the lower moonbase, and he just laughed and ignored it.

Reeves leaned over the table, with his face bright red, and told him that they were to go out and investigate outside the moonbase, which was dangerous, and he did not know what he wanted to do!

Could they handle the gunmen out there? Yet they had to do their job, and they had space vehicles and proper air supplies, and he was sure that they might be able to trace the gunmen’s footsteps to where they came from!

Chapter 8

Moonbase X2

Terrific explosions from missiles shattered all three space vehicles into wreckage in seconds and sent Weaver flying across the floor of a space vehicle!

The whole vehicle was instantly thrown into complete darkness and through a window Weaver saw moondust and rocks, and he heard air being sucked out the vehicle and he realized that his spacesuit helmet was not on and he fitted it on at the same time as the other soldiers. Everyone had survived but the impact had destroyed the vehicle and they were unable to move away from their position on the lunar landscape, and he was sure that people had been hurt in at least one of the vehicles, and he heard through his helmet communicator one of them was on the brink of death!

Suddenly he felt a missile being launched nearby and hitting a distant location.

The openness and predictability of the attack was staggering to him and that they were powerful with such weapons there surely connected them to some powerful military group.

The shattering thud had surely bruised his body somewhere!

Whoever fired the missile and smashed the vehicle would surely be ready for them and would give another attack and they had to get outside and get into cover before they were killed!

They quickly agreed what to do and rushed out the door to a position where the others were gathering, behind a hill of large boulders nearby.

Once there he immediately followed their eyes through their spacesuits to a distant position behind two small hills where there was part of a vehicle visible.

Who the hell could be there? None of them could get onto the moon without having a major country behind them! Unless they were part of some secret group at the moonbase! Yet what the hell were they doing? Did they intend to kill them all? Yet they had not been able solve what their identity was when they had first attacked them when they had arrived there!

Whoever was there had to be crazy beyond anyone he had met or crazy to do something no matter what the outcome was?

He was sure of it! Someone was determined to stop them doing something no matter what!

Yet their mission was to have a look around outside and to trace where their footsteps led to from where they had attacked them, and he realized someone did have something there! He could also recall one of the scientists telling him that the scientist called Lucas had been there when he had vanished!

What a stupid place for a battle or war! They could barely move properly and made numerous mistakes!

He was confused at who could do it and he kept going through his mind, over and over, as if he was missing some vital clue! It never even looked like the moon at that position and looked like a large asteroid in orbit, with the sun blasting out at their side.

Someone had just destroyed expensive American space vehicles at a confidential hidden American military moonbase!

The lifeless sky showed him what the stars were really like and how insignificant the suns and worlds were They were nothing in the depths of space and the strange darkness was peculiar and so empty that he was sure that matter was the peculiarity and that nothingness was what should only exist, and he imagined himself at the outer edge of the universe viewing the suns and what really existed in the depths of space!

A battle soon broke out between the two groups and they blasted missiles towards each other, and he started to see the advantages that they had over them, as they insisted in staying in their vehicles and he was sure that they had blind spots!

He stared out into a strange dark region of the landscape at the lifelessness and saw the light from the planet Earth going across it like moonlight on the Earth, and was amazed that it was actually there, as though there as a reminder that he should be there instead of being on the moon!

He felt objects about him and how weightless they felt and like light Earth rock, and he examined a dead soldier nearby at an overturned vehicle! Then he started feeling his body at the places where he had hit things! The spacesuit had not been damaged, and there were repair kits aboard the space vehicles, anyway!

It was strange they had the whole moon to themselves, and they were the only ones outside on the surface and he started to like its peculiarities!

He imagined thousands of years passing by and the Earth shifting through time and people starting to colonize the moon and massive structures being created, and he wondered what reasons they would stay there for.

Was it one vast leap for mankind into space or for technology?

Suddenly he saw the amount of air left in his spacesuit and gasped, and realized that they had put their foot in it again and that they would have to take drastic action!

He heard one of the soldiers mention through his communicator of them contacting the moonbase and he realized that far more soldiers and vehicles were on their way! Yet he was sure that their enemy would escape at some point and he desperately wanted to get something on their identities or where they were staying!

After a swift conversation with Commander Cavern they made an agreement for Weaver to go over and check out the enemy without being seen, on his own, and he used a route that was over to the side that was covered over by small hills, and he shifted there fast, and far faster than he thought he could move there.

He spotted one of the vehicles almost identical to theirs and wondered why it so closely resembled it. Was it people at the moonbase?

He realized the advantages of them having the same vehicles as he knew their technology and capabilities and he knew where to sneak up on it without being seen!

He could have brought a missile and destroyed it and was surprised that they had not even some proper defense! And he kept looking everywhere for anything.

They could have at least put some hidden vehicle hidden in the background that was capable of seeing anything and destroying it!

Yet they had technology to detect vehicles and things everywhere! And he considered the dangers of modern warfare!

Surely they would need it at the moonbase, and he recalled trying to something, as they might have had recordings of the gunmen attacking them when they had landed on the moon, and he could have used it to trace them to where they went.

If there was anything there he was not being allowed to know about it, and he considered having someone force them to give them the vital information!

Once next to the vehicle he knew they could not kill him with its missiles and would have to climb out with guns!

Yet though he was there he could not do anything, and did not want to do anything anyway, as he wanted to follow them to where they went! Yet the problem was that he only had so much air and he would have to return if they stayed there too long!

A high-powered rifle blast on a nearby rock astonished him by making no sound, and being so close, and being from his group of soldiers, and he examined the impact on a rock in front of him, and realized how dangerous it was, as it smashed it to pieces, and he saw someone over at his vehicle with a rifle. The surprise was that it made no noise and had so much velocity and impact at that distance, and he wondered how far it could actually travel.

Suddenly he saw the vehicle leaving, and realized that it only had one missile left, and he rushed up behind it without them being able to see him and climbed onto the back and fixed himself in place there, and knew that they would keep the last missile in case they needed to use it against a direct attack.

It surprised him at how calm they seemed and how they reacted like they thought they could not really do anything against them! They attacked American military space vehicles, and a major military group, on the moon, and hardly showed any significant reactions to being in great danger! If they had been fully aware surely they would have not missed destroying them all at the start, and left immediately if they failed their mission.

They could have done the job far more effectively there at a close range, at a place where there were no hills, where they could not have left from, and could have had people with guns outside!

What next surprised him was that they were moving in the direction of Moonbase X1, but at a strange angle, and he watched on confused. Surely they could not be from there, as they would surely be caught eventually!

At a large hill near the moonbase he watched it stop and was amazed when an area of a cliff region shifted and an entrance opened and the vehicle swiftly moved in, and he realized how little air he had left and gasped at the dangers of going into it, but he decided to go in as he might not have enough air to make it to the moonbase.

Once inside they went into a chamber where air blasted in and he searched everywhere for observers and cameras but never found any, and once the vehicle entered into the base he removed his helmet and searched everywhere for a place to hide and when it went around a corner he rushed off remaining hidden, and moved back to a corridor.

The moonbase amazed him as it was far larger than he had expected and he started wondering what the hell they were up to, as he could not realize how they could build such a place! How did they manage to get supplies there without being seen? The cost and men behind it would surely have been inconceivable!

Only a major country could be responsible for it, and he had to discover who and what was behind it being there.

Everything was virtually identical and he was staggered, and he moved around checking everywhere. He was determined to survive and leave there with what he discovered, and to find out what they were up to at the same time.

He realized that they had to have been trying to scare them away from there, and going there, and he realized that the space vehicles were manned by the same type of soldiers as was at the other moonbase!

He searched around corners of corridors and dived out and rushed along them searching everywhere, and started finding empty laboratories, and searched through drawers and files, and checked information in their computers.

One room looked more important and significant than the others and he swiftly checked a computer there and discovered something that had to do with a confidential program and experiments and he copied files and he left.

His speed and accuracy increased and he investigated everything that he could and went down a staircase, which he was sure was to the bottom floor, where he was sure there was something, as was in the other moonbase and there were suggestions of it on files! It grabbed his curiosity more than ever, as what the hell were they doing there?

The incredible things he considered due to recent past surprises were incredible, but he could not prove or grasp any real solid evidence!

What the hell were they up to? This case was really fascinating! There were things that did not add up and make sense everywhere, and once again he could not think of any equivalence! He had never even heard anything occurring in space, and the normal ones were nothing compared to this one! What would real wars in space be like? Were there many surprises?

From a hiding place, at the corner of a corridor, he watched a scientist walk away along a corridor and he studied him with some astonishment as he was not the slightest bit different from any normal scientist and had no suggestion of ever confronting anything dangerous as far as he could see, and he wondered what the soldiers in the vehicle, which had fired the missiles at them, were really like and wished that he had seen them.

He rushed around the corner when the scientist moved into another corridor, glancing at everywhere along the corridor until he got to the corner, and from there he watched him in the next corridor and the way he smoked and got ready to throw away his cigarette onto the ground, and Weaver got ready.

When he looked again he had gone away around another bend into another corridor and Weaver rushed down the corridor, not wishing to miss anything, and he spotted the amount of footprints there that were visible on the dirty floor!

He never knew what to do, and if he did get caught nobody knew where the hell he was! Would he have to defend himself against soldiers there with guns?

The area he moved into had to be the most desolate and darkest place of there but it still looked a modern building! Should he try to go and get help or at least tell Commander Craven? At least he would not die in vain! He would only need to find a new air supply, which had to be where they kept their spacesuits!

There was a strange haunting dark look there, which looked exaggerated by it being an underground moonbase, but it had long shadows and glows that held secrets and dangers from peculiar lighting, which surely had been designed to avoid the use of too much electricity!

He started thinking of if he could catch them and the scientist doing something and whatever he was doing there, as he was sure there was a good chance that they would be, and he removed his handgun and checked it and put it away and thought of how far the soldiers there had gone to stop them going there and he prepared himself and started planning escape routes if he was to escape!

At the edge of the top of a wall he saw a large crack going into the moon behind it that he examined and wondered if any air could escape through the ground, but doubted it and moved on.

He swiftly moved after the scientist when he saw him moving faster, and he felt that something was nearby, and he wished again that he had some form of communications to Commander Craven and realized that they could pick it up if he found something.

The cost of it proved that if there was something there that it would be incredibly valuable!

He remained silent and wandered along the corridor in the one direction, going further and further away from where he had been, and found the entrance to an elevator and automatically entered it and went to the last floor below, where the scientist had gone.

He stood confused when it kept going down, and far deeper than the last floor height!

At the bottom he gasped and watched the doors sluggishly open and reveal a corridor and he walked out trying to see about him and saw nothing in the dimness there, and as his eyes adjusted he watched the elevator doors shut and return to where it had been, and a deep thud echoed along the corridor from somewhere, and he realized the corridor was far more different and cleaner!

He entered deeper into it and looked into empty rooms, wondering what they were up to there, as all he saw was laboratories and places scientists had been working, which looked as though they had been recently used, and he examined one in detail, looking for clues of anything, and found mentions of particles and particle research and realized that their work must be similar to Moonbase X1.

Even though he could not realize why the moonbase was there and its purpose he was sure it had hidden military secrets and he wondered if they were working on something like a new form of biological warfare and gasped at how dangerous it could be, especially if they went all the way to the moon to keep it from being discovered, and he wondered if the were maniacs capable of trying wipeout mankind with it!

He wondered what other kind of secret weapons they could have discovered, which might not have been revealed to the world, and he wondered what the whole structure might have originally been like when built, and he realized the implications of them going out there on the moon and that it could be some of the most highly confidential stuff available! The dangers he could be in were tremendous, and he was trapped there, on the barn moon on his own!

Behind him he watched a white shape appear and saw it was a scientist in a white jacket rushing somewhere nearby, and he wondered if he could question him and watched him vanish into a doorway and realized that he had not even looked there or seen him, and he wondered what he had been up to as he saw that he clearly had been actively working on some secret project.

All the incidents and appearances of things stuck deep in his thoughts and he tried to grasp clues and something that he could have missed!

What the hell were they up to? This case was fascinating and extremely annoying! Things added up to little and made no sense everywhere, and he could not think of any equivalences! He had never even heard anything take place in space, or on the moon, and the normal cases were nothing compared to it!

He swiftly moved through the corridor wondering where it went and what the use of having so many laboratory rooms was, and he considered using an assistant in future cases.

He remained silently wandering along the corridor and came to a doorway into somewhere and he gasped when he entered it and an immense brightly lit tunnel appeared, where there was an immense particle accelerator!

It surely was the Particle Accelerator X1 tunnel from Moonbase X1, and he was unable to feel happy or unhappy with the discovery as it meant that he had escaped all of the dangers there but it also meant that he had not actually discovered anything!

It also meant that the soldiers that had attacked them had been from the moonbase after all, which he was also unsure whether to be happy or unhappy about, as though they could catch them by tracing who left the building and had not been about, which had to be known and recorded somewhere as there were bound to be cameras and other surveillance at the top floor somewhere.

He studied the particle accelerator and was staggered at its complexity! He was unfamiliar with particle accelerators but saw its size and it was far more advanced and clearly for some other purpose than the normal versions.

Thoughts of him originally discovering the time warp in its chamber astounded him and he was surprised that they were still surprising him with the vast amount things they were using on the project, and he realized how they had underestimated them and he wondered why!

Could he fully believe them? He wondered if they were after all creating a cover for some new form of weapon or something far more powerful that they had discovered!

Chapter 9

The Particle Accelerator Black Hole

Weaver entered a colossal particle accelerator research chamber, where he had expected to find the time warp in its chamber, and to his surprise he discovered a similar chamber with something far more different, which left him staggered and wondering how they had managed to replace it!

Again he totally ignored giving himself away to the scientists and stood with his mouth wide open at the side of it trying to make different contemplations.

From somewhere he heard someone mention something about them using the new Particle Accelerator X2 to increase the amount of particle size black holes, in different forms, and they were being kept in existence in powerful magnetic fields, and they were forming large black holes.

He could not get what they were talking of at the time and just ignored it!

The particle accelerator and tunnel had been different, which he had started to realize earlier, and he wondered if he had entered a different section of the tunnel where there was another immense sphere chamber.

After his existence was revealed he had to continue entering, and was rewarded for it by being allowed to see properly inside the sphere chamber and that in its interior a colossal black hole form was blasting wildly about itself within the chamber.

He considered if something had altered it into a new form but he could tell it and the chamber were different, and that it was another particle accelerator, and he knew that he had not entered the other moonbase, or the particle accelerator there, and that they were carrying out experiments of something else, which he could not grasp!

The chamber was mainly the same but there was far more different equipment about it!

He spotted its powerful magnetic field in the chamber, and it clearly suspending it, but not firmly as it shifted wildly about itself, and Weaver studied all the scientists now standing behind him in a group, and he studied their expressionless faces and tried to grasp what they were thinking.

Many others were behind them at monitors and equipment checking the results being showed, and he studied inside the chamber and followed all the glares of the scientists to a metallic gleam from a camera being suspended motionlessly in mid-air.

He believed that it had to be a black hole and gasped and wondered if there were many particle accelerators creating such occurrences, which was being covered up!

As he entered further he saw a colossal laboratory further in, in a doorway behind them, and hundreds of scientists at work there and his opinion of there changed, as they were surely not what he thought they were! Yet why were they there on the moon, and what were they up to?

He recognized one of the leading scientists and listened to them intensely, but all they gave him was that they were carrying out a series of basic experiments on the black hole.

He shuddered at the sounds and shudders of things from its tremendous force and watched the power of the black hole and the forces holding it there and he had feelings of it being dangerous, and he watched the scientists in the outer room and started to notice their reactions to the dangers and that they were keeping away from it, and he was sure it was more recently discovered and altered in some way than he realized.

Their abnormal antics captivated him and he realized that they were intending to do something at some point and he could not get what the connection was with it and the time warp at the other moonbase, and why there were two moonbases there! There had been no suggestion there or at the other moonbase of anything!

The black hole confused him and they had not come out with anything to explain what it was or how it was formed, and he believed that they would have discovered many unknown things.

He realized that if they were an entirely different group that they could have been trying to form a time warp like the other particle accelerator and that they might not have done it right, and he did detect that they had not been entirely successfully! They would have had to have built it on the moon, as it would not have worked on the Earth with the gravity!

Yet he could not believe that they could carry it out so close to the other moonbase!

An audience formed in the outer laboratory behind him that baffled him, and they gave loud accounts on the discovery of it, which for some reason they all avoided explaining anything directly about.

Many of the scientists were clearly famous and the atmosphere was unbelievable, and as though they were waiting for something unbelievable and dangerous to occur in the near future!

He sensed that most at least accepted him as being one of them and he felt a shiver run through him as he sensed again something was going to occur! The thing looked entirely deadly and pulsating with energy, and looked and sounded on the brink of something!

One outsider scientist looked the most confused and sat in a seat behind him examining everything, considering what had happened and was occurring, and perhaps why they had not told them much.

Weaver at times watched the black depth of the black hole and the abyss that existed there, and after along time of carefully examinations he left it as he was unable to identify anything.

It looked like some form of freak show at angles, with some strange lighting.

He watched a group of scientists moving in equipment that they were working on and arranged it around the front of the sphere, and he gasped and wondered what they were doing and dealing with, and for a moment thought he saw it shift position!

The scientists went to the edge of the chamber and entered a highly advanced atomic clock near the black hole’s field, and the scientists reacted immediately when they noticed little and concluded that its precision digital numbers were barely altered by it, unlike the time warp at the other moonbase, and it altered the clock’s shape and it shifted slightly inwards, and they studied its altered bent shape created by it, and most of the audience watched the phenomenon with amazement.

Many filmed it and what might be an incredible historic occurrence and a discovery that proved black holes existed.

The scientists occasionally gave detailed explanations of what they were doing and believed was occurring, and one finally explained its formation and Weaver listened intensely as he explained that black hole particles had been discovered to exist years ago and that powerful magnetic fields had finally been used to make them last longer, and finally remain in chambers without vanishing, and they had rebuilt the particle accelerator on the moon where their experiments were able to work properly, without the effects of gravity, and the particle accelerator had finally been designed to increase the sizes of the black holes.

They had used the new particle accelerator on the moon to increase the amount of particle size black holes, and in a powerful magnetic field they kept them in existence, and had gradually formed a large black hole in the sphere chamber.

Weaver learned that they had been unsuccessful in opening a gateway or time machine and that they had only been able to send things into it and that they had not vanished and they had pulled them out, and he wondered if it was a black hole and what it was!

From what they said he concluded that they believed that they had only discovered a hole in space, which never led anywhere, and that it was not a hole in time, and he wondered what they wanted it for!

Weaver realized the implications of it though and that they might be able to create a real one and he wondered what use it would be and if it was far more or less dangerous than he had imagined, and he considered what would happen if he entered it!

New leading scientists were allowed to investigate it and they crowded around it loudly discussing it, and they announced it was the first discover of a form of proper black hole.

It looked as if it were rupturing the fabric of space and insignificantly played with time!

Many of the principal scientists talked about working with it and carrying out numerous basic and complex experiments on it with all the equipment now available, and they showed detailed information they had accumulated, but most was missing as it was confidential, which left scientists and him wondering what else they had!

The principal scientists were captivating, mystifying them with the depth of their fears, and like with the time warp he had not seen such scientists react about anything such as it without there being something tremendously deadly!

Chapter 10

The Morning After

The Moonbase X1 bar was full of soldiers and Commander Craven gave some of them orders to carry out things in the future, and glared over at Weaver enjoying his drinks next to Reeves, and Weaver sensed he had now fully accepted what he had told him about the other moonbase and that the moonbases were attached together by a hidden tunnel.

It was incredible Commander Craven had visited there and had used his influence with the American military there to have the soldiers that had attacked them caught and checked out and they had found them and the people with them and they had imprisoned them at the other moonbase. People and cameras had seen them leaving there!

What was incredible was they had been openly making out that they had Russian origins, and that they were just spies, but there were no proper explanations from them on what they had been doing that fitted into all their actions! Nothing made any sense and they were making out they did not properly speak their language!

Yet again it surprised him how easily they had been able to get there and into such a confidential site!

Now that they had captured them and they could go outside in space vehicles and look about! What were they hiding? He now wondered if they had actually done it to keep the other moonbase secret? But why had they gone to such lengths though? There were no good reasons and most of the scientists knew of the other base!

Weaver enjoyed the low gravity effect and he watched Reeves at the other side of the table drinking fast and laughing hysterically, with another soldier beside him.

He realized again what one of the scientists, who knew the soldiers who had fired the missiles, had told him and that they had attacked the leading scientist called Lucas and that he had suddenly vanished without a trace!

It had been the way that he insisted that he knew Lucas and he should know about it that intrigued him, and Weaver intended to follow his vehicle trail, which he had shown him the position of on the lunar landscape.

He could not make anything else out and it surely was worth investigating!

He had given him his word that he would not deliberately give anything away he should not and that had been good enough!

Even though he had cleaned up a few major mysteries he had many left! He still could not work out what their discoveries would end up like when they had finished advancing them! What could a time gateway do? Yet if they created a time machine what would happen? And what would a proper laboratory black hole be used for? He had not even noticed that there could be a difference between them!

He wondered if they were the worst discoveries he had found and what damage they could do if they achieved their goal?

Yet he was sure it was exaggerated and he wondered if it was even possible to travel back in time! What damage could they do if they traveled there? He wondered if they would just be able visit there and not be able to influence anything, and just view it as a recorded sequence of events! Yet what about going into the future? It would be useless as far as he was concerned!

He wondered again, would it be possible to build forms of particle accelerators in space itself? Why did they have to be so large? If they could just decrease the size!

He considered what damage and uses the antigravity they had could be used for, especially if they managed to make full antigravity.

They could build proper space stations of immense sizes, and give them enough matter to give them some gravity. Yet had they any form of artificial gravity available? And he wished that they did and introduced it!

Weaver watched all the people at the moonbase bar and some of the funny and different ways the lower gravity affected them!

Things in this case were connected in a way he could not grasp, and he did not know what to do! Surely something existed that could complete the puzzle and he started to become convinced he needed to discover it or the mission would be unsuccessful! Even though they had caught who had committed the crimes, which was why he was put there, there had to be people behind them doing it!

Chapter 11

The Search for Lucas

When Weaver arrived at the wreckage of Lucas’s space vehicle he was sure that the explosion from the missile had been so tremendous that the remains of Lucas’s body had to be inside.

Yet the more he examined it the more he noticed that he could very well have survived the impact, as a large region where the driver would have been was hardly damaged!

He quickly fitted his spacesuit helmet on, checked his air supply was full, and he swiftly left the vehicle.

When he walked around the wreckage he saw that Lucas had crawled out from under the vehicle, and he studied his footsteps going away from the vehicle and the way they were paced and he knew that he had been in great danger and had ran for his life!

He examined inside the vehicle where he had been and saw the sky through a gap in the remains of the vehicle that showed the stars at where he had been trapped below the wreckage, and the strange darkness and emptiness, and he imagined him staring out at the strange dark landscape, and he saw the planet Earth there as he moved to get away from the vehicle.

Weaver carefully examined the vehicle from where he had been outside and saw that there was not much else to see there, and he started following his footsteps over to some hills.

The shattering tumble surely could have injured him, but he saw no proper signs of it!

They had definitely fired the missile and smashed the vehicle to kill him and he had known it! They had to have been crazy beyond anything Lucas had encountered and he had run for his life!

Weaver realized that he was also there alone on the moon himself, resting against some moon boulders, and he examined the moondust, which surely had helped cushion the blow when the vehicle had landed upside down!

The vehicle was beyond repair, which he would definitely have known, and what left him staggered was there was no way for him to communicate with the moonbase as all the communication equipment was damaged!

The oxygen in his spacesuit would not have been enough to get to the moonbase!

He had survived the impact! Yet was he better off, and would he suffer a worse death later by suffocating an agonizing death?

He quickly rushed across the strange dark landscape as fast as he could and towards the moonbase! He had hardly even set foot on the surface, especially by himself.

It was then that Weaver spotted tread marks of a vehicle where it had fired at him and he traced where it had moved to.

He found where a high-powered rifle shell had blasted and the impact on a rock, and realized how dangerous it was, as it smashed it to pieces! The surprise would have been that it made no noise and had more velocity and impact, and he wondered how far it could actually travel on the moon.

He wondered what warfare in space would end up like! Would they use lasers? He was sure bullets were far better? For one thing lasers would only travel so far and a bullet in space could keep going as there was nothing really to stop it!

He studied Lucas’s large spacesuit shoeprints dive across the mounds of moondust as he had tried to accelerate away, with the low gravity muddling his perspective of movement, and spacesuit getting in the way. The thickness of the materials was great! Whoever was there had to be determined to kill him!

Once again he hid behind more hills and used different ways to use the low gravity and vast leaps to move fast away!

The moonbase had to be located in one of the most desolate places mankind had been!

He realized the deadly environment surrounding him again as he studied it. The deadly cold was far lower than anything on the Earth! It made Weaver cringe, and blindly rush on through the mind-bending landscape, still tracking his movements, which went behind hills to avoid being seen.

He knew that once they had found his footprints leading there from the smashed vehicle that they would have traced his movements in the moondust, and he saw that he had deliberately made it harder for them to trace by rushing over rock areas and changing his direction, and he spotted where the space vehicle had arrived and chased after him.

He knew he had hit an ultimate deadly scenario and being chased by deadly assassins across a barn world lost in space and time, with his home world in the sky lighting him like the moon had lighted him!

Weaver wondered why he thought he had not been shot, and he recalled the information that they had found out from the assassins and he was sure they had not shot him, and he wanted to know what had happened to him! Surely he never had enough air to make it back, and Weaver checked his own supply and knew he could not have made it back!

The case intrigued him and he had to find the answer! He never had enough air and was using up more and more air, and it was making it take longer to arrive at the moonbase by moving in different directions. Surely they had known where he was heading!

Yet why could he not have hidden and died there? Something strange had happened to him and he sensed it by their reactions!

He could not even imagine him having found a way out of such a predicament! If he had remained in the vehicle he would have ran out of air and he had put his foot in it from the start!

What did he think these people wanted by killing him? It would have been a vast mistake for him to hand himself over to them! They surely would not have kept him as a prisoner!

In the distance he saw where a missile had blown up and he saw how his movements had changed and where he had accelerated himself forward, as it was all he could do to save his life!

Suddenly Weaver stopped and saw his direction strangely change and he stood trying to see why as there was nothing there and he would have been losing time, energy, and air!

He had rushed away over to his side and he followed and he watched his prints head back and to where the other side of a hill he had passed was, and he realized that he had actually came up with an idea, and he grew more intrigued at what the outcome had been of it.

His prints vanished as he had gone over rocks and he followed where he had to have gone and he entered a canyon between the hill, where he must have rushed through, going over rocks to cover his prints, and he realized that he could have found somewhere to hide, and he wondered where he had gone as there had been no prints there when he had been at the other side!

Occasionally he spotted marks he had accidentally left while rushing through the canyon, over small rocks on the ground, and he started to examine the rocks and way they had been cut and that they looked artificially cut and he wondered who would want to do anything there, and what had they been doing!

He started to wonder what was there! Was there something hidden away there? What could be there in such a desolate place?

Suddenly he found something buried away in rocks that had clearly been disturbed, in an area at his side!

Weaver increased the brightness of his spacesuit light to see what was there better, and saw something artificial beneath the rocks and dirt!

He removed it and revealed a metal grid cover, where he saw dust being blown out from, and he grabbed a handful of dust and threw it over it and was surprised at the power of the flow and the dust blowing up.

He was sure it was air and that something below was blasting vast amounts of it out and he lifted the metal cover and found a vast tunnel going straight down deep into the moon below, which had clearly been hollowed out with some large powerful drill.

He realized that he had escaped after all, and he wondered what was below, and he knew it was too far away from the moonbases to be part of them.

It amazed him and intrigued him and he wondered what had happened to him. He imagined how fast he must entered the tunnel, escaping for his life, and he decided that he had to check what had happened and what was there and he rushed into it and put the metal cover over the top of it, after making sure it was covered over.

He climbed down a metal ladder going down into the metal pipe tunnel and he rushed into it.

He was sure that there was a reason for it being there and that something was below! Surely there was surveillance equipment somewhere below, and he realized that he was on the moon and he doubted if they would bother. What was the use in it?

He swiftly aimed his light downwards and started examine everything that he could see and when he saw nothing but the pipe and ladder he began climbing downwards again, as he considered what would be below there.

Mind-bending sounds and echoes mingled through the hollow metal tunnel going through the air, from his movements and heavy breathing, which grew denser the lower he climbed, and he realized how he missed sounds that were outside.

The air blowing by gave haunting whistles occasionally, and he eventually realized that there was enough air around to remove his spacesuit helmet and he removed it slowly testing the air and seeing if the air was alright and dense enough for him to breathe, with him ready to put the helmet back on, and he finally with satisfaction turned off the air in his spacesuit.

The air blowing up smelt strange and he could not recognize what it was, and he wondered why they had so much air and were blowing it out, and he wondered what could be below. The depth had to be great as he could not even see the bottom and he had shifted down a large distance.

It was strange thinking of what Lucas the scientist had been like with the deadly pursuers outside, and being almost trapped there. Surely he had foreseen them not climbing down after him!

He was stunned at the dangers that he had been through and realized that it could only happen on a place like the moon, and he wondered what was there that they wanted him dead for!

They were too deadly! They had destroyed entire space vehicles with powerful military missiles!

No matter how he tried to shake it off and contemplate anything below he never formed any stable recognitions, as he had not seen anything like it, and he continued downwards wondering if he was finally making his first major mistake.

He wondered if there were moonquakes! And he stopped to examine an area where part of the metal tunnel had been damaged by something, and he wondered if that was another reason why they had chosen that region because there was not.

Yet they had underground hot water available to them, for water and air, and that meant there could be some! But he was sure that they were not major quakes.

Clouds of dust blew upwards blasting through the wind rushing up and it swirled around him and through beams of light and his shadows shifting about as he continued rushing down, edging down into the darkness at the bottom and to some unknown destination and future event, seeking to discover what was below and to solve the accumulated mysteries.

He wondered what his chances of survival were now and of accomplishing his mission and solving all the mysteries and problems, and wondered if he was going to be killed later by something stupid.

He moved down faster and wondered if Lucas was still alive and if he could bring him back to the moonbase, realizing the mistake he could be making and what could be below, and thought of the trouble he would have getting back to the surface and trying to find the vehicle in the dark strange surface, and wondered what Lucas was doing if he was still alive.

He examined how the tunnel had been built with some interest in detail trying to grasp some aspect of the builders of it, while glimpsing parts of the shaft overhead, and was surprised again at the extensive detail and that everything was built to perfection and he considered the expense of its construction.

He had always wanted to investigate such great mysteries and he could not believe that he was actually on the moon! He had fantasized doing such things but he had never for one moment thought that he would do it! They had actually been building and staying in moonbases since the moon landings! Incredible! He had not even heard a suggestion of it being carried out, and the people that created fantasy situations of it had given future scenarios and moonbases constructed out of building materials fitted together on the surface and had not built underground constructions that had water and air supplies, which could easily be supplied with places to grow all the food, which he had not been able to confirm existed in anyway, and was sure that they had all the food and their other stuff just brought in. They preferred professional Earth products than homegrown products.

He was exploring the unexplored and wondered what unknown phenomena existed on the moon! The land available to explore on the moon could well exceed the Earth, with most of the Earth being underwater and ice! Look at all the discoveries found on the Earth over centuries, and according to the information he had seen they had hardly even explored any of the moon!

He had at one time wanted to be an explorer but there was nothing really left on the Earth to explore! He wanted to explore more and find some new major discovery! He had wanted to explore and discover new things of value and greatness!

What treasures could be hidden away in such regions of the moon, with it being so unexplored?

What was he dealing with here though? Why were they trying to kill people out here? What the hell were these scientists really working on? Were they just trying claim massive research funds or something? Were they protecting something that they had invented that they intended to use?

Something of unfathomable unidentifiable nature was lurking there in darkness, and he could not grasp it no matter how hard he tried! Nothing he knew of was good enough to explain it!

As he lowered himself progressively he started to realize the depth of it and wondered what the hell he was letting himself in for! He had hardly been on the moon and had found incredible occurrences everywhere! It was like lowering himself into the depths of hell!

People being on other worlds fascinated him and he wondered what it really would be like and all the things that they had missed and what mysteries were hidden out there! They had hardly explored anything of the moon and most of the scientists acted like the whole place had been checked! Satellite scans and probes could not show vast amounts of things! The probes barely even checked a small region of miles! A human could check in a day what they took years to check!

Weaver stopped and rested, realizing how tired he had become, and took a drink and some food before continuing!

There was something not right! Something secretively had been built there and he could not grasp what and why it was being covered up, and he considered if it was the Russians there. Had the Russians built a moonbase there like at Ice Station X1?

He realized the implications of it and that he could get trapped there, and wondered what was below. But he had to check what was there, no matter what! He could not let it go, and he had to survive and get the information back!

He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and shoved it back in his spacesuit, and continued.

The warm air seemed to get warmer as he got lower and he kept thinking that he had arrived at his final destination because of it, and he wondered what could produce so much hot air and how much fuel would be wasted generating it, and wondered how much fuel they would have to bring in to supply it if it was, and realized that they could easily create hydrogen from water!

He realized that they could probably also use atomic fuel to power it, but why did they need so much?

The tunnel was incredibly and uniquely drilled and fitted with a metal pipe and made with incredible precision, and he knew it had to belong something advanced. What he could not work out was what would be built there and how they had managed to build anything so low below the ground on the moon. Even though the other moonbases were very deep, but the fact still fascinated him, especially as he had not believed it possible or possible for decades for them to be able to do anything!

A silent thud echoed up from below making him jump and listen intensely and eventually he looked down trying to find something, and considered putting his light up to see better, if there was anything dimly lighted there, but he saw that it was a freak air gust moving something below and he tried to guess the distance to where if had come from, if it had come from the bottom on the tunnel.

When the bottom finally appeared he stopped and stared in wonder, and considered what was in the deep blackness there and what he was putting himself into!

He was mainly left confused over what was there, in the depths of the moon, out in deep space, and wondered how long his spacesuit light lasted. Yet its radiance was about the same and he realized that it could start going out quickly!

What would the outcome of his investigations be? Would he even find anything? What could be there?

When he reached the bottom he was too busy focusing on getting there fast to see anything other than a metal floor, and he only looked around him when he had got off the ladder!

All around him he saw metal tunnels moving air about, as part of a large ventilation system and he wondered what it was all needed for, and he heard something nearby powerfully blowing out air through one of the tunnels and he immediately started crawling through the tunnel to see what was there and he came across ventilation openings, and he looked for people but never saw anyone or anything that he recognized!

He continued searching and eventually came to where the noise came from and where the air was being produced from water.

He moved further along and came to a large ventilation opening supplying an immense chamber, where he saw in the dim light a large artificial black object resting in the central region, which went out and vanished somewhere in the distance, in darkness, and he examined what he could properly see and tried to see the roof a hundred feet above, and it going higher further in, and he gasped and wondered what hell he was looking at!

It surely was an alien voyager in the chamber, and he wondered if they had found it there deep beneath the surface of the moon!

He entered the chamber after removing the ventilation cover and explored over to its side and discovered immense amounts of highly advanced equipment and he examined the controls and realized how new it was, and he traced cables from it!

It all seemed centered around and monitoring the immense strange black voyager at the center!

He was staggered and yet it was strange and it never fully resembled an alien voyager, and it even resembled an immense black submarine! Yet it was like the voyager found at Ice Station X1! It had the same material and everything! It had no openings and was solid, and he believed it was some form of spacecraft!

He was staggered and exhausted and could not understand any of it! They surely could not have put it there and it had to have been found there!

How could anyone have been able to hide and carry out such an operation there without being noticed?

He realized again that it could have been built before the other moonbases had been constructed and that it could well have been a hidden part of them! There could be an underground connection! Whatever it was it had to have been even more secretive than anything else!

He realized the danger that he was in and he had to get out and have the thing investigated and find who was behind it!

Yet he realized he should investigate it further, and decided to check it further, and he quickly returned to where he had been and did his best to remove all signs that he had been there and got ready to make a quick exit, and he started investigating everything he could find!

An eerie sensation gripped him after a while and he examined computers, searching for answers, checking everything! He sensed something weird was there, which he could not recognize!

Chapter 12

The Particle Accelerator Gateway

Weaver had hunted through complex computer data on the origins of the voyager for what must have been hours until they had detected his presence, and he was sure they had only allowed him to live to explain how he had got there!

To his surprise he had been put in a cell at the moonbase with Lucas, and he realized that he had completed the mission of locating Lucas on the moon!

Lucas looked ragged and had been trapped in the cell on his own for a long time! Grunts and sounds Lucas gave took strange tones about the strange underground low gravity cell, and Weaver could scarcely believe that he was the leading scientist!

Weaver had to strain his eyes to see him in the dimness, while he considered what he had, and he decided to try to solve his accumulated queries and he started by giving him information on himself, and he finally asked what he had on the voyager!

Weaver wondered if he was giving facts or theorizing, and swiftly replied, “How did you find out?”

“They questioned me and I gave them my identity! They checked up on me! They trust me now and reveal confidential information! But they are not letting me go as I know too much!”

He clearly was not positive if they would allow him to survive, and they were clearly waiting for something to happen!

“From what origins is the voyager?” he asked firmly.

“Its origins are you!”

Weaver gasped and immediately laughed out loud, seeing he was being comical!

“Truly!”

“It originates from you!”

Weaver thought he had either gone mad or he had after being hit on the head.

“The material that object you call a voyager is in fact the material that you discovered at Ice Station X1. You gave them the alien sphere of the indestructible material, which the alien voyager there was made of, which had a microfilm in, and they managed to find out how to make it!”

Weaver gasped and recalled the alien sphere, and him handing it over to his military intelligence agency, and that it had been the only object that they had left from the alien voyager!

“They discovered how to make it then! But how did they manage to build a replica of the voyager?”

“They never! They used it for something else!”

Weaver could not understand, and recalled wondering if they could in fact use it and of what use it would be!

“That object you call a voyager was an earlier experimental version!”

“Of what?”

“You have been in Moonbase X1 and Moonbase X2?”

“Yes! They told you!”

“Well, this is Moonbase X3!”

Weaver realized that they had actually built three, and wondered what the hell they were playing at!

“What was it built for?” he moaned.

“All three were originally built for research, for scientists and laboratories, many years ago! Each was to research the moon and things in low gravity in different ways. Moonbase X1 has the lowest confidential clearance, and X2 the next, and Moonbase X3 is the most classified! Only the most secretive experiments and technologies are used here! Usually for the military! Most of its research is to this day still highly classified!”

Lucas rested against a wall and put his feet up on a chair in front of him.

“They were given the particle accelerator projects years back, and they have been brought back to life with all the discoveries that they have been producing!”

“What has that voyager object to do with particle accelerators?”

“The first created a time warp, which they managed to trap in a magnetic field, in a spherical chamber. The second moonbase created forms of black holes, and built up a form of black hole in a magnetic field, in a spherical chamber. But they were unable to make the time warp or black hole do anything for them!”

“Correct!”

“Well, they have been carrying out experiments here with that voyager shaped object, with its indestructible material, and have been detonating their most advanced and classified mass destruction explosions in its sealed interior! To test and discover the outcome! Their past experiments of confining such explosions have not been altogether successful until now, and they have been blasting holes out of space and time with it!”

“What did they find?”

“Their research was incredible! But it was useless because when they used the process of opening the object the gateways kept closing! But they managed to get the information that they wanted!”

“Which was?”

“They used it to create a smaller spherical chamber, made from the indestructible material, and they entered the time warp they created, trapped in its magnetic field spherical chamber, and the black hole, trapped in its magnetic field spherical chamber, and their best bomb, and they sealed it shut, and they have blasted one of their explosions inside it!”

“What the hell would that do?” Weaver gasped, wondering if they could blow the whole moon up.

“I am not entirely sure as they have just completed it! But they definitely have something! They are all at work there now, monitoring everything, and checking what’s inside!”

“What do you think they have?”

“We’ll soon know as they are about to open the sphere!”

Chapter 13

Particle Accelerator X3

The guards allowed Weaver to enter the colossal Particle Accelerator X3 chamber on his own, and again he wondered why the scientists wanted them to bring him there, and he staggered in with his mouth wide open.

The black sphere was colossal and rested behind the central region, where it had been built, and was surrounded by so much equipment he could not recognize anything!

The black sphere was clearly the advanced spherical chamber, made out of the indestructible material, and he was positive that they had not opened it yet, and gasped as he saw all the thousands of scientists, in laboratories going around the edge of the cavity, all monitoring and working with equipment, clearly gagging over it, and the opening of it, and he sensed it would be soon and that he was brought there to watch it being opened, for some reason he could not comprehend!

To his surprise he recognized many of the scientists from the other moonbase particle accelerators!

He recalled Lucas’s last words and him telling him that it had been a secret military group there who had been killing people to stop their secrets being taken and the Russians had not got a thing!

He had always wondered how far they would go to stop their stuff falling into the wrong hands, and he realized that it had to be someone behind the project who had ordered it, and he wondered if they were a renegade group!

He was taken over and into the main laboratory, where all the main scientists and people behind the project were standing behind a window, made of a powerful bombproof translucent material, and the guards left, and he watched everyone in the chamber with the sphere enter the laboratories, and they lowered an immense black dome screen from the roof, made of the indestructible material, and it was put around the black sphere.

When he turned he saw the colossal laboratory further in, and the hundreds of scientists working away there and his opinion of there changed, as they surely were not what he thought they were! Yet what were they up to?

The abnormal antics of many scientists captivated him more and more – again mystifying him with the depth of their nervousness, and fear! They repetitively studied everything around them, and with alarm, preparing themselves, and he realized how dangerous the opening of the black sphere was, but he could not fully grasp it as he had not been told enough!

What would the most powerful explosion known to man do inside a confined sphere of indestructible material and enclosed with a time warp and a black hole? All he had from passed experiments of blasting the explosion in the indestructible material was it blasted holes in space and time! Yet could it create a proper black hole? Were they actually carrying out black hole experiments?

He wondered again why it was really being carried out there, on the moon! Was it so dangerous it could destroy the Earth? Was it the ultimate weapon? And what did they want with it? Perhaps an answer to a future war with an ultimate alien race!

It confused him and they had not come out with anything to properly explain anything or what it would form!

In seconds he and everything about him flew into the air and landed on the floor, as an explosion blasted through the ground, and he watched it smash through the laboratory, smashing things and sending scientists crashing all over the place!

Many scientists rushed back to equipment and started fixing equipment back in place and started monitoring what had occurred outside in the dome, and soon announced that the black sphere had been opened, and again Weaver realized the dangers!

To the horror of some scientists about his front the massive protective dome of indestructible material was slowly lifted, and he wondered what would have happened if they had not put it around it!

At first he believed that it was a black hole when the dome rose, but then he knew it was something else, and gasped and wondered what they were all creating and had been covering up!

He recognized some of the leading scientists nearby and listened to them intensely but all they gave him was that they were going to carry out a series of basic experiments on it.

Scientists went around monitors in groups checking the results of things being showed, and he studied inside the chamber and followed the glares of the scientists to their smashed equipment there, and realized that they had actually compensated for it and they had expected something to occur!

What he saw of what it had created resembled a perfectly spherical black hole at first, but a clearer view had emerged and showed that it was far more, and more complex!

A powerful magnetic field was suspending it from inside its chamber of indestructible material, but not firmly as it shifted wildly in places, and he studied all the scientists standing in a line about the front of him now, and studied their blank faces and tried to grasp what they were thinking and studying.

When he moved beside them he shuddered as he heard and felt the shudders of its tremendous forces and watched the power of it on objects all over the place, as though it could destroy anything put against it, and he watched the way objects close to it kept altering from one reaction to another, being manipulated in many different ways, as many forces played around.

A larger audience formed behind him that baffled him with accounts of the discovery of things at their equipment, as they avoided giving detailed information, and he knew much was missing as most of the equipment in the black dome had been destroyed, even though they had compensated for that!

Many of them were leading scientists and the discovery was the climax to many years of work, and the atmosphere there was unbelievable, and as though they were waiting for something else of unbelievable magnitude and danger to occur!

He sensed that most accepted him as being part of them, and he felt a shiver run through him as he sensed again something was going to occur and he sensed that he was there for a reason! The thing looked entirely deadly and pulsating with energy, and looked and sounded on the brink of something, and he even considered if it was some form of life!

One outsider scientist he noticed sat confused and in a seat behind him examining things, considering what had happened and was occurring, and perhaps why they had not told them much.

Weaver at times studied the shape of the black central region of the black hole form as it altered to something, and after along time of carefully examinations he thought he saw it do something to itself, in some form.

It was powerful and deadly, and looked like some form of freak of nature, and he watched many of the scientists start to enter the chamber through the door, trusting in the powerful magnetic field surrounding it to hold it and its forces confided, and he watched them start taking in equipment and arranging it around it, and he gasped and wondered what they were dealing with, and for a moment thought he saw it shift in its reactions!

Yet they knew what they were doing and had worked on the project and similar objects, and were top scientists in their fields!

Some scientists went to the edge of where its proper reactions were occurring, and where the magnetic field’s influence reached, and moved equipment there, and he watched one leave a highly advanced atomic clock and shifted it into the object’s field using a robotic device, and the scientists reacted immediately when they noticed results and concluded that its precision digital numbers were being influenced, with it altering time, and they studied the clock’s altering shape, as its matter was altered, and other alterations in space and time occurred, while its many forces played around, and he watched all the phenomena that occurred with amazement, as one influence after another occurred, and many played at the one time.

It was as if the universe there had gone crazy and into chaos, and it was trying to alter itself back to reality and stability!

Famous scientists filmed it and what might be an incredible unique historic occurrence and discovery! Proving their theories of many things!

The scientists occasionally gave detailed explanations of what they were doing and believed was occurring, and one finally explained its formation and Weaver listened intensely trying to grasp what he could, as he explained, and realized that they might not fully know what they were confronting! He finally saw their point and that what they knew could easily be wrong, as they had experimented little and had few precise facts so far! It was a mistake saying anything until they had seen the outcome of what they collected!

Weaver gasped at the findings they gave, and accepted that they were in the same situation on needing more findings!

New leading scientists arrived about it and were allowed to investigate it and they crowded around it loudly discussing it, and they applauded it and announced it was the first discover of its kind, and gateway to the stars, and Weaver stood staggered, as they explained their project of building it and building a wormhole, and they intended to use it to explore the universe.

The audience wildly applauded them, and he knew they had invented a stargate, and they intended to use it to go to the unexplored stars.

Many of them talked about working with it and carrying out numerous basic and complex experiments and that they intended then to send in a probe, and they showed detailed information had been accumulated!

As Weaver stood next to where its forces reached, considering how a probe could possibly return or send information, he realized that he felt a draft or air being sucked away and he felt something emerging from its confines and grasp him, as though crawling out, and he felt himself vanish into its confines!

Chapter 14

The Gateway

The black sphere in the Particle Accelerator X3 chamber vanished behind Weaver as he hurtled out the universe!

Startled cries and last conversations of scientists swirled through his thoughts, and taunted! Surely they had not used him deliberately! He could not give a proper scientific account, if he survived, and a new probe should be found!

Explosions of radiance of powerful stars exploded through the wormhole stunning him, and he started spinning, and a colossal whirlpool of lines of light magically formed, and he studied it for a long time and realized that he had no proper bodily presence, and he slowly lost consciousness.

He came to startled and realizing that he was accelerating through the wormhole at hyper speed, and realized that streaks of light shooting passed him were powerful outer suns!

It was a gateway but there was no exit point and he could not guess what hideous place he could be thrown out! Would he be smashed into particles or disintegrated into nothing by being thrown out of something like a black hole?

How worse could the situation get? He could be trapped there for eternity wishing he had died!

A black blur emerged ahead in a central region of stars and drew his attention, and he started to recognize detail in it, as it grew and he shifted into it, and when near it he saw magnificent distant stars brightly shining in its depths.

More powerful stars appeared near him and spectacular white beams exploded out and he realized the tremendous speed that he was traveling at!

The outer universe was appearing and expanding all across his front, and he was shooting into it!

The stars were dazzling, which he could not recognize! They filled space everywhere, and he was staggered that they could even exist in their states!

A form like a black hole stretched out across space all around his front and he wondered where he was being thrown out, and something suddenly altered!

He sensed something! Something of ancient origins existed there! Its existence was all about him but he had no proper awareness of what! He perceived that he was being transported to another destination, and that something was happening before he fully entered the universe, where he would have taken human form and would have suffocated in space, and he believed that he had entered another gateway and that he was being transported away to another destination.

The gateway had been advanced into something else and he studied it shifting him around locations of space, and an explosion of movement left him stunned but still firmly believing in its safety, and he felt as though he was in something this time, and that before he had been hurtling uncontrollably through an uncontrolled gateway.

Again he felt something alter and that he had reached another far more advanced gateway, which was not as ancient and was far more advanced, and in vast leaps across the universe he was instantaneously emerged and relocated, appearing in vast strange and mind-bending star regions, emerging about him as though he were floating through them, and he studied bright glowing star constellations, and with mind-boggling powers, with an accuracy and capacity inconceivable, it located a point in the universe, and he sensed something strange, and it completed its voyage!

Chapter 15

The Stars

For a moment he had a weird sensation of something happening, as he came to, and he opened his eyes and examined his body!

He had emerged somewhere out of the gateway but he was in complete darkness! He realized how little he remembered of anything! He could not recall anything from some point in the gateway where he had lost consciousness, and had no recall of anything after! It felt like an incredible amount of time had passed, and he could not recall why, and he realized that it could have been the time effects of the gateway!

He realized that he had actually survived, and what must be the most dangerous mission and anything that he had ever undertaken, and he realized that he could have actually avoided the whole lot and the discovery of the gateway if he had not given them the indestructible material, and he considered his earlier thoughts of it at the ice station and what value it would have if they recreated it!

In the surrounding blackness he thought he saw something shift, which he examined, and as his eyes adjusted he saw a faint blue radiance, which he considered as a star, but he made a closer examination of his surroundings by feeling around him and felt he was in something artificial, in some form of structure, and he felt a hard floor and he stood up, in his weakened state, and felt slightly sick, and dizziness, and held himself firmly upwards.

When he felt better he felt a faint vibration from something running through a wall and touched it and tried to realize what it was, and what material it was, but he was unable to, and knew he had to have light to realize anything!

He returned to staring at where the faint blue radiance was and finally realized that he was actually in some form of room and looking at a crack in the structure.

He considered if he had been mistaken and if it was some form of reflection, but now in a more alert state he positively recognized it was what he had attained it to be.

He gently approached the crack, which went into something, and watched it create a vague beam of blueness along a black wall. He could not imagine what it could be! What could be there?

For a second his emotions ran amok thinking of the incredible experience and voyage through the universe he had taken, virtually on the brink of existence, seeing the spectacular view of the universe and what it really was!

In the darkness he felt an eerie sensation that the place was stranger! He sensed a presence, as though something was nearby, and he wondered if it was at the blueness through the crack!

He slowly moved up to the crack and was dreamily observing it when he started to realize that it was an entrance to somewhere, and he realized that it was a door and he gripped it and pushed its black shape, and it opened out, and strange lights blasted out at him everywhere, giving flashes and beams of radiance!

He staggered in, feeling how sore and tired his legs were, trying to see the interior and it became more perceptible and he saw a room full of beaming colored lights and controls.

To his side he spotted speckles in the darkness there, and he moved further over, and realized that he was glaring out at the stars of deep space!

He actually was on a moon station in the depths of the stars!

He realized that the gateway had locked onto the nearest object and best place to situate him and that he was out on some moon!

He searched through the blur of controls in the dim room, only lighted by controls, looking for anything familiar, daring not to touch anything.

He realized it was actually out in the deepest depths of the stars! Galaxies away from where any human had gone before!

It seemed to be desolate, left out in the depths of space, endlessly trapped in time and space.

His thirst for knowledge was increasing and he insisted in checking everything that he could and he suddenly spotted the room that he had appeared there in and he realized that it was strange and he attempted to examine it in the lights from the controls, now that he could see it, and he realized that it had to be some form of gateway, which used the wormhole, and that he had appeared there as it had been open, and he knew there might be a way to return through it!

Other locations were surely there! How could he travel back to the moon? Then he spotted something at the side of the doorway, and that there were forms of controls on the wall!

On his approach he spotted a form of screen and a line of dots going down its side and he pressed the first and was amazed when the screen lit up and showed a view of a dark place.

He remained there, moving his head at different angles trying to see what was there, and moved back to see it better and he saw the room, which he had appeared there in, had vanished and there was a gateway, and region of blackness identical to the blackness at the center of the gateway at the moonbase

He put his hand into it and realized there was no pull and it was far more advanced than the Moonbase X3 gateway!

He leapt in it and rushed through a wormhole and yellow globes became visible, and his vision adjusted and he saw the place that had been on the screen further out and he entered there and saw that it was a dimly lit narrow corridor, and he turned around and saw that he had been in an identical room to the one at the other place and that it had a screen and controls at its side.

At a distant region of the corridor it abruptly darkened, where the lights did not go any further, and he saw that it was the corridor of something, and he moved away from the gateway to it.

Corridors went out endlessly all along it, and he examined everything, and he sensed the size of the structure was colossal!

He walked into the darkness at the end of it until an entrance finally appeared in front of him, and he opened it, not seeing where he was going, and his side hit something!

In amazement he saw that he was no longer just in darkness and that a large translucent dome surrounded him, and he turned, and his entire sight filled with the stars of deep space!

It was an observation point of a starship, and it was designed so it gave the observer a view that was identical to being in space and being surrounded by stars. The black floor and starship was barely visible behind him.

A distant sound startled him and he could not realize what could create it, and it sounded like it was caused by a living thing, and he realized how alone he was there. Perhaps more alone than any human in history! He was in the deepest deep space itself! Endless light years away from the solar system!

He was positive that it had been the noise of something though, and he gently shifted himself away, making faint moving sounds. And he moved towards where he heard it.

In the dim starlight he shifted into the corridor and spotted a closed entrance on the wall, where he was sure the sound came from, and he silently opened it revealing a dark interior, with some lighted controls.

He examined them wondering how fast the starship was traveling, and realized that it must travel at many times the speed of light or the starship would be useless!

He returned to the wormhole gateway, and on approaching it he spotted the form of screen and line of dots going down its side, and he pressed the first that he saw and was amazed when the screen lit up and showed a view of a bright place, and he entered the wormhole, and the darkness swiftly turned to blinding light and he could not see at first, until his eyes started adjusting, and he saw he was in a type of tunnel about his size, about him, made of translucent material, and below he suddenly saw an incredible world covered in bright blue water, glowing in intense brightness!

He was sure if the light had been more powerful it could blind him, and he watched reflections of strange objects in the water of the world below, and he watched distorted shapes and a distorted sun, which seemed magnified.

He was on some form of colossal space station, surrounded by other forms of space stations with tremendous sizes, stretching out for miles all about him, with networks of translucent tunnels, with large round and square bulges.

The sun there was of an incredible size and he realized that the place might have been built an incredibly long time ago and that the sun had increased in size for some reason.

He entered a spherical bulge of transparent material, connected to another translucent tunnel, which went on into the distance.

Stars shone at his side intensely, as he clumsily rested.

Another large world’s sphere was shining in space, at his side. It was completely different, and he could barely believe that it was a normal world.

Further along, he spotted a region, and he stood staggered, where he spotted a region of the space station with an even more colossal size, stretching out for hundreds of miles all about it, in networks of translucent tunnels, with large round and square bulges that had sizes that were in miles.

After a long time, of observing everything, he returned to the wormhole gateway and made his way back to the starship.

In the darkness of the starship he stood shocked at what he had seen and he realized that he did not know how to properly handle an alien encounter with a highly advanced race! How could he communicate with them? Other locations surely had them! The dangers were immense and he considered what would happen if they found the gateway at Moonbase X3, and he was sure they could not deal with such an advanced civilization! If they were deadly it would be the end of everything!

On his approach to the screen and line of dots going down its side he gasped, and gasped more every time he pressed a button and saw a new location on the screen, and stood amazed when he saw one with a view of a bright place, as he recognized something, and amidst a blur he saw it was a view through a rotating sphere form at the center of a chamber, and he spotted the scientists at the moonbase faintly visible about its sides!

The starship’s technology was incredible and he somehow sensed there had to be something there on how it worked and he returned to where all the controls in the room had been and looked around until he found a hidden away screen.

He looked through information on it, which he could not decipher, and searched for anything to do with the starship and started photographing diagrams and drawings of it and information with it, and photographed everything he could, using a device he had, and for hours he continued on going, until he was sure he had everything, and what he wanted, and returned to the wormhole gateway, and decided to return!

He realized their knowledge was colossal and he could barely understand it! They used the gateways to keep their civilization connected, over the immense expanses of space!

The familiar pattern of movements of the Moonbase X3 wormhole was amazing and he never thought he would be watching them from inside it, from galaxies away!

While he was thinking of all the other worlds there were on the screen, and undoubtedly on other entrance points, an unusual view appeared on the screen and he watched Commander Craven entering the Moonbase X3 chamber, and stand talking to Lucas, and Weaver rushed through the gateway!

Chapter 16

The Transcendents

All the scientists stood staggered when Weaver rushed out of the wormhole without warning and rushed over and shut down the colossal magnetic field holding the gateway open!

It was incredible that it worked and that the whole gateway collapsed and vanished, and he spotted the relieved faces of many of the scientists!

The extraordinary scene that developed there afterwards was incredible, and he warned all the scientists there what was there and that mankind was not ready for an alien encounter of its kind! It would be far more dangerous than the Ice Station X1 voyager!

Some leading scientists started trying to reopen the wormhole, but they could not, and he believed when he reported everything he had that they would avoid doing so, and the immense cost of constructing another was too high!

He was also sure that they had carried out all their experiments on it as an entire month had passed since he had entered it, and he realized he had been going through the wormhole for an entire month, before he had arrived at the room, and he started to recall some strange encounters that had taken place, and he had met the last of the transcendents that had built the more advanced version!

He realized that it would have resulted in disaster for mankind and that it would have met with many civilizations and things far more advanced and that it would have been destroyed!

He realized many civilizations must have encountered the wormhole while trying to build their own and had been stopped with different methods!

The entire chamber was full of scientists and he saw that many were angry and he wondered what they would do!

Eventually a famous leading scientist took a microphone and started calming them, and Weaver was handed the microphone to explain what had happened and he wondered if they would accept what had taken place!

He suddenly recalled more of what had occurred in the stargate, and his encounter with the highly advanced transcendents, from another universe, and for some reason he started to explain what the dangers of using wormholes were, and his encounter with the transcendents and that in the starship, to explore the stars the correct way, they had given him plans to build a starship!

Part II

The Alien Sphere

Chapter 1

The Alien Sphere

In the outer fringes of the black hole, shifting wildly about itself, within the opened up alien sphere, a metallic gleam of light was magically suspended, motionlessly in mid-air, from the surface of an electronic clock, by the scientists.

The clock held at the end of an almost invisible cable, of translucent material, had its precision digital numbers frozen in fuzzy multidimensional forms (in a suspended cluster of partially transparent layers).

Professor Bergman, the leading scientist, had it released further, edging it into the black hole, creating more spectacular optical effects from the clock, making it distort in twisted forms (shaping beams of light with matter like a form of glass sculpture).

Its numbers shifted fast forward, until they froze again, and the clock almost vanished, and they stopped its progression.

A loud cheer erupted from all of the scientists and technicians crowded into the laboratory, applauding.

Dexter realized that it was more than a rupture in space. It had properties of suspending time! It was a hole in the fabric of space and time, and a gateway into the depths of time.

He had staggered when he had first observed the pulsating alien sphere, when he had entered the laboratory of the UN Space Agency – where leading scientists were carrying out a series of basic experiments on it.

They had not been able to determine its origins, so they had brought it back to the Earth, to allow leading scientists to investigate it.

He had shuddered as he had studied its cleaned surface and perfect sphere shape, with no blemishes or openings.

The abnormal antics of the laboratory scientists had captivated him – mystifying him with the depth of their nervousness, and fear of something! Some still repetitively studied the controls of an immense laboratory laser, with alarm – preparing themselves!

What were they going to do? Had something gone wrong in their earlier experiments?

A swift flash of light had exploded out, and the laser’s flickering beam had blasted into the sphere – silencing all the scientists.

It had triggered it to unlock, open (with a deafening bang), and reveal its inner chamber, where it was – by the manipulation of gravitational forces – suspending a black hole.

Professor Bergman calmly raised his hand, quickly giving a signal to a technician.

“As you see,” he announced, “it manipulates perceptions of space and time – within its outer radius! It suspends, accelerates, and suspends it. And if you’ll look – to the clock – suspended at its outer radius – it decelerates it too.”

The cable emerged outwards, pulling the clock back, with its numbers going swiftly backwards, until its numbers once again became motionless.

“And if you examined that clock, you would see that the numbers don’t move backwards!”

“Professor Bergman!” a scientist, next to him, called out. “If something fell in there, would it go on a quantum leap? Would you say that it would appear at some stage after its collapse?”

“I personally believe that it would travel into the future. But where it ends up is not in my field of knowledge!”

Dexter wondered if in reality the black hole was different from what they perceived. But he dismissed the idea. He did accept their philosophy!

“What are your intentions?” another scientist called out, from behind the group. “Are you going to send something in there?”

“We have investigated it little, so far, and if we do, I can assure you that I shall have you all informed about it!”

“What uses to industry do you think it may have?” the scientist continued. “Could science not use it? It has the power to stop time in its outer radius!”

“We do not know at present how safe it is! We shall test it much further, and we may find a use for it – as you mentioned.

“If you will take an observation of its shifting movements, which we have been studying closely over the past few days – which some of you may have observed – as its constrained pattern of movements has dramatically altered.”

Dexter examined its lethal appearance. It resembled a large black bubble of pure energy – buzzing wildly and dangerously about – ready to discharge somewhere.

“Do you believe that space is full of black holes like this?” another scientist asked. “Is space full of them from events such as the big bang? And how long do you think it will last?”

“There may be many, scattered throughout the universe, and a danger to any explorations of space! Thus we can study this one, and learn to detect them.

“The length of time that they exist may depend on their size and the conditions that they exist in. We just don’t know how long they last! However, I can give you other details about this one. Our fact sheets have all our findings, from our experiments, which may interest you.”

A technician entered, nervously listening to everything, and began handing the documents to the scientists at the doorway, and they queued up to the back of the laboratory.

While Dexter stood waiting for them to finish, he sensed something peculiar, but he kept his sight on the queue, where the scientists were having captivating discussions.

As he listened more, a gentle draught appeared, and he discontentedly tried to detect where it was coming from.

But it increased, and he realized that it was not a draught – the air was being sucked away. And he glimpsed a hideous black shadow over the floor, with a horrific shape emerging.

He then stood frigid, watching the black hole crawl through the laboratory’s protective screen material.

In an instant it vanished and reappeared across his path. And he could not escape: the strength of its pull was far too great.

The whole laboratory erupted into a frenzy of activity, and he plunged into it – hurtling into blackness – with existence rapidly vanishing.

Chapter 2

The Fringes of Eternity

In a blur, he was floating over all the stars of the universe, and tumbling through the depths of eternity – far from the nearest stars – out beyond reality.

Obscure illuminations endlessly shifted, as he wildly spun around, with no real awareness of anything.

A tranquil abyss flowed surreally against him.

A shape gradually emerged, of a stretch of shininess.

He came to, from his state of disarray, studying it.

How had he managed to end up in such a far-out place? Where was he? How could he survive?

He felt as though he had been falling through something, and he tried to grasp the concept, and where he had been.

There was no longer any light of the outer universe!

Large stars magically appeared about him, with incredible dimensions, and shone with blinding rays.

Howling air suddenly blasted at him, and around him, and he plunged down, and he saw the night sky, swirling about him.

He was over water, and falling out of the sky.

He realized he could survive, and prepared himself.

A roaring and blinding surge of water hit him, and he dived through it, swiftly sinking downwards. And he automatically put out his arms, pushing away water, stroking and tugging, pulling himself from the endless depths of water.

Chapter 3

The Shifting Jungle

The rhythms of the waves, skimming over the surface of the black sand, gently brought him out of his sleep.

He felt the warm air tenderly caressing his lifeless body.

He had vague recollection of him swimming ashore, the night before, and then hearing Selina, screaming, and her splashes, and him pulling her ashore. Then, before he had rested, and had fallen asleep, a dog had come splashing out of the water, at them, and he had discovered that she had brought her dog, Darwin, with her, which she must have had concealed in her luggage in the laboratory.

He watched her, with curiosity. Her laboratory jacket was ripped to pieces, and she held it around her.

He was sure that they were the only two to go through.

The warm colors of the red sun blazing down, and the bright celestial objects shining through the sky, turned the world about him into a wonderland.

The stars, and color of the sun, made it apparent that they had traveled further into world’s future than he had imagined possible. He estimated the length of time that had passed as being at least many millions of years.

What would humans have turned into over such a long time? Would there actually be anything left …?

With astonishment, he focused his eyes further, to view the tropical beach, with the crimson glow of the sky over it; and, at the end of the beach, he saw an immense perpendicular cliff, curving out to the sea.

With an abominable thud, Dexter felt something crash against him, and he swiftly rolled sideways, to see a chunk of vegetation.

He shaded his eyes, and clabbered upwards, startled at the fascinating sight behind him. A jungle of unknown variations of trees and plants went along the beach, in both directions. Many overhung the shore like palm trees, with types of fruit clustered at their tops. Some nearby plants resembled strange forms of cactuses, with animal-like hairs thickly scattered over them, instead of spines.

The sun was blazing, and the air was turning roasting hot. Golden patches of sand, through black sand, glowed in bright red sunbeams, while the turquoise sea sparkled it.

He stretched out his painful limbs, feeling slightly dizzy, and he turned his blank expression to a smile. He had actually survived, and he was on an island.

Their main task now would be to find food!

Why had he not seen any fish …? He had to check again – there had to be some.

Sounds of rummaging came from behind him, from something strange in the undergrowth.

“Where are we?” Selina suddenly groaned, rubbing her eyes.

“We’re resting on the shore of an island!”

Why had he not seen or heard any birds? Surely there would still be forms of seabird on an island.

“There’s something peculiar about this place!”

“How far in time do you think we have traveled?” she asked, holding her head, looking at the bright tints of the sun.

“At present, I don’t have a clue!”

“Is there anything to eat?” she spoke, throwing a pebble along the sand.

Darwin shook himself, and he ran after it. Once he reached it, he smelt about the sand, looking for things to eat.

The sand was starting to burn the soles of their feet.

Splashes of water sprayed over the sea, at his side.

“There’s a giant fish!” Selina shouted, gaping outwards.

“A fish …!” Dexter answered, moving to the water’s edge, looking downwards. “It is more like a sea snake! It looks dangerous – it has spiked jaws!”

His eyes stayed on the clear water, where the creature’s orange shape, covered in thick scales, floated by.

The fantastic island glowed with fabulous spectral colors, in the intense red sunshine. It was fantastically surreal – there was vegetation everywhere behind the beach. Colors of nearly every conceivable variation of the entire spectrum glowed all over it, like a mind-bending cartoon. Vegetation of all shapes and sizes mingled. Loud eerie sounds appeared, from creatures within it, which he felt vibrating in his ears.

“That’s probably just some bird …!” she answered, while adjusting her pieces of clothing.

She walked to him, and she balanced herself against his side.

There were no proper fish, but there were insect-like green plankton. He found them edible, and a good source of nutrition. The water on them tasted strange, and it was surprisingly consumable, which was peculiar, as he had not heard of a slightly salty sea.

After a few handfuls of the plankton, they grew sickening, and he knew that they could only consume so many of them. Therefore, they searched for other things, as they silently staggered along, beside the sea. There were many types of algae, but they did not touch them – their appetites now demanded proper food.

The coast was so unreal that he was sure that he was walking in a dream, and had consumed some form of hallucinogenic.

Along a stretch of the beach, he saw that the vegetation still was too dense, and that they still could not enter it. Its shapes shifted continuously, as though things in it were shuffling about, with some kind of an itch. Its complexity was tremendous, and his mind could barely grasp what he was observing; and he continuously glanced into it. However, what grabbed his attention even more was that there was no wind or anything that could account for it.

He knew that she had no explanation for it either: she was more concerned about where she was.

To his astonishment he realized that the trees were not normal: they were mostly similar to giant plants, going up to at least fifty meters high, and others resembled immense mushroom-like plants, with feathery seeds falling from under their domed tops. In one direction they formed part of the jungle, going out as far as the eye could see.

Distant shrieks of wild creatures came from within them.

Dexter briskly sharpened the end of a stick of vegetation, on a sharp stone, making it pointed, and into a reasonable spear.

It would do, until they could make something better.

Dexter occasionally climbed up small trees, hanging over the beach, to remove some of the fruit-like vegetation growing on them. Their shapes and sizes varied greatly, and he easily pulled some off, but he needed to cut many off, with sharp stones. Some were much like coconuts, and they had to be smashed open, to reveal their nutritious contents.

After they had tried the majority of the varieties, they started collecting the best ones.

Suddenly, as they were about to finish, Darwin did a strange thing – he ran away at full speed, and he disappeared into part of the jungle. His loud bark then went through the vegetation.

They swiftly left what they were doing and ran after him. It was not like him to leave when there was food about. Furthermore, if there was something dangerous, why had he been so enthusiastic to encounter it?

The dog stood peering into a more dense part of the vegetation, trying to find a scent, as though whatever had been there had escaped. Some mysterious thing had hidden itself!

However, he realized something even more bizarre, which he had seen and had just ignored. In a shallow pool of black mud, at his side, there was a footprint, which looked like his own. It was a faint impression, and neither of them could explain it – or even be positive that it belonged to a human.

He did not know if humans still existed.

Why was it a bare footprint? Had humans gone back to living in the wilderness? How many of them would there be? How dangerous were they …?

At their side, he spotted a newly fallen tree, creating a gap, which would allow them to get further into it.

Once they had climbed through it, he saw that its density decreased, and that they could scramble through it.

Their heads darted about, looking for traces of any signs of life, and anything that would indicate the presence of humans. Even though it was hard to believe that humans were on the island.

Apes had human-like arms, hands, and feet. Could there be an animal such as this hiding in the vegetation – like a Bigfoot? As he thought about it, traces of two pairs of footprints actually appeared in the soil at his feet, and he found a clear set of them.

What had they been doing here – at the beach? They were fresh, and they were differently sized footprints, almost identical to theirs. They had walked through to the beach, and they had gone back into the island. He was sure that they had been actually watching them, from further up the beach.

Deep musty scents like flowers and pine mingled through the hot air, while he carefully placed his feet, treading quietly over the ground. And he crouched, ready to shelter.

It was a mysterious jungle, and it created an extremely intense atmosphere. At any moment, he expected to see a tiger-like animal hiding in the tangle of vegetation.

Their pace stayed slow, at a speed that they could see anything dangerous in their path, while staying hidden.

There were no signs of them. Where were they going?

Just ahead of him, where the footprints went, a white shape emerged in the multicolored vegetation. And he approached it cautiously, searching everywhere he could. And he saw that it was something resembling a giant egg, with size of him.

Even though he thought of it as a form of plant, it had to be a creature – it had a white leathery skin, which pulsated …

It shuddered when it sensed them near to it, and they tenderly followed the prints passed it, ready to escape; and they swiftly continued away from it. He soon saw what it was that they were going to – a short distance away, there was an artificial tower, stretching high above, where its top bulged out, loomed over the trees, at least fifty meters above.

They approached it, in stages, examining bits of it through gaps, trying to figure out what it resembled. In the distance, the shapes of shrieking creatures hung on branches.

“What do you think it is?” Selina gasped, breaking the silence, as they moved into a clearing, about its base.

“It could be some sort of observation station …!”

“How old could it be …?” she uttered, looking at its black surface. “If we can establish that, we may be able to establish how far we have traveled into the future!”

“And how long ago a civilization existed …!”

“It’s made of a material like metal,” she muttered, “and it’s not corroded anywhere …”

Dexter unsuccessfully attempted to dent and scratch its surface, and they wandered around its base, until they came to an entrance, which looked as though someone had recently opened. Its inside was dark and gloomy, and, except for a pole ladder, it was empty.

“Where are they?” she said, looking straight up, with her hand over her eyes.

“Stay here –” he spoke tediously, and started to climb up the ladder pegs, into the darkness.

The only sounds that he heard were the clangs of the ladder echoing upwards, as though he were clambering through a sewage pipe.

The hot air drifted up from beneath him.

There was little for him to see above.

Sometimes he believed that he saw someone climbing down to him. He now saw Selina’s point of view, and that it was not worth it – but if he could just find one clue that would answer his queries about the world.

A freak wind made a hollow whistle through the entrance, and died away. The temperature had to be reaching its maximum limit. He tried to imagine what was up at the top of it, but he had no evidence of anything.

He plodded on, while the light under him grew fainter; and he realized that he had underestimated its height. He had been climbing too fast – it had exhausted him! He felt his legs give way under him. It was not a normal ladder – he had to grip the handles to stay on it – the handles were at large distances from each other, and he could not properly rest on it. He was soon hanging on for his life, with the pole swaying under him. However, he managed to rest, in a different position.

In the blur overhead, a vague illumination became visible, and he vigorously moved towards it.

When he reached it, he saw an entrance to a room, where faint beams of red sunlight shone, and he fell over onto its floor exhausted. Then, from somewhere in the surrounding darkness, a black shape shifted over the light.

Chapter 4

The Mysterious World

A spectral shape floated over him, but his unfocused vision simultaneously altered, allowing him to see a crouching figure, looming above him.

“So you made it …!” Basinger murmured, grinning at his face. “It’s Dexter!”

“Wait until you see the other tower …!” Burrell spoke, as he appeared at his side, humoring him, while holding back a smile.

Dexter reluctantly dragged himself upwards, from where he had just managed to rest.

“Come over here …!” Burrell called out, moving over a gap in its outer shell.

Once at it, Dexter stumbled backwards, stunned at the height that it was leaning over.

Selina’s figure was at the edge of the jungle, where she was examining the vegetation.

Another gigantic tower was looming up in the sky in the distance, where Burrell was pointing.

There must have been some danger in regularly climbing up the towers! Who had built them? What function had they had? Had their descendants just been energetic?

A glance about outside showed him that the island was far more different from what he had believed that it could have been. In many directions, there were miles of jungle terrain going far into the distance.

“So what do you think it is?” Burrell finally enquired.

“It might have been a communications tower.”

“You may be right!”

Basinger and Burrell returned to what they had been doing, over in the darkness. Dexter followed the bulged out outer wall in the opposite direction, going in a circle. It was peculiar – it looked as though nothing had been in it – there only seemed to be the blank surroundings, and he finally arrived at where the others were standing.

It confused him, because it was entirely empty. Had they emptied it of everything that it had contained?

Then he saw that there was another entrance, in front of Basinger, which they were trying to open. It was at an area on the central section, where the other entrance was behind, through a wall.

Basinger fiddled about with a type of keyhole, and stepped back bewildered.

Dexter saw a faint gap in it, further along from them, and he pulled at part of it, sticking out. Then he pushed his fingers into the widened gap, and yanked the jammed entrance open.

“You did it!” Burrell proclaimed, congratulating him.

“Would you like to go first …?” Basinger said, and held out his arm.

Dexter immediately climbed into it, gripped its ladder, and pulled himself up.

He was soon on its roof, over the top of the structure, where there were just curved edges around it. Its view was astonishing, especially with it dangerously sloping.

Selina gazed at what appeared in front of her as though she thought that reality had finally gone haywire. And when she saw them she dropped the vegetation that she had been examining, and strolled towards them.

Selina stared at him, searching for any signs that he was exaggerating his claims.

“What did you do once you discovered you were on this island?” Dexter enquired further, thinking of a light that he had seen on the island, which had guided him to it.

“I’ll tell you …!” Basinger announced, cleaning his brow of sweat. “We awoke under the cliff over there – on the beach – under it – where this vegetation stops at the cliff. We believed that there was not anything on the beach …”

“We have been surviving on sea creatures,” Burrell continued. “And we have been thinking of different ways to hunt animals, to survive here!”

“There was nobody else in the laboratory! We entered it to save some equipment, and establish what had happened. That black hole is unstable, and a menace to civilization. Its power was incredible!”

“Have you any food?” Burrell asked, wildly eyeing up the vegetation about them.

“Yes!” Selina replied. “We have found some food!”

“Do you think that it will be safe to stay the night here?” Dexter announced, thinking of solving future problems.

“Did I not tell you that we found a cave, over at the cliff?”

“What will happen if the sea floods the beach?”

“The sea cannot reach it – it’s too high up!”

Selina and Dexter slightly nodded their heads, and they followed Basinger, leaving towards the cliff.

Basinger was roughly the same, but Burrell had turned wilder, to survive in the wilderness – and he savagely ate part of some type of creature, as he trailed along behind them.

Basinger already had a map in his mind of the jungle about them. They had been exploring it, searching for food. They clearly had not noticed all the fruit-like vegetation growing at the beach.

Basinger picked up and played with a simple animal trap, which he had made out of vegetation. He turned it around in his hands, studying it, mentally making a vastly better version.

Basinger took them onto the beach, which went under the cliff, and they silently strolled along together, examining the water and rocks, while Darwin ran about in front of them.

Part of the cliff, in front of them, hid the area behind it; and Darwin suddenly smelt something and ran around it.

A high-pitched shriek instantly came from something! And, at their swift approach to it, Dexter heard the dog chasing after something.

They then saw Darwin standing steady, rhythmically barking at a white object, at the cliff.

“What is it?” Selina murmured, approaching it.

“It looks familiar!” Dexter answered. “Could it be a descendant of a species of seabird?”

“It should be edible!” Burrell grunted, almost drooling.

Basinger gripped the ball of white fluff, while the dog jumped about at his knees, and he carefully wrapped it in the tattered remains of his jumper. Then he checked that it could not escape, and it gave out a muffled shriek.

Darwin then splashed through the water, and pulled out a stone-shaped object; and he dropped it onto the beach. Dexter immediately saw that it was similar to a shellfish, and he knelt beside it. He swiftly exposed the inside of it, revealing a type of oyster. He considered having the dog taste it before him, but he could tell that Burrell had already eaten them, so he tried it – and vaguely liked its peculiar meaty taste. They then collected as many of them as they could carry.

Basinger unfolded his jumper, and he showed them that the furred creature had died.

Basinger took them to part of the cliff, where the cliff was enormous, and a straight wall of rock. And Dexter spotted a small cave, forty meters up, with a slope of rocks under it, which they could climb up.

“It’s a perfect shelter!” Dexter told them, as he climbed up.

“We could build a fire in it!” Selina explained, as she followed them.

Once they were in it, he watched the sun edging towards the horizon.

“I am sure there are flint stones here …!” Selina told them.

“But can we find anything that will burn? Are there any plants about here that are flammable enough to be ignited by the sparks?”

“There is plenty of dry stuff!” Basinger replied.

Basinger chipped different rocks against a rock, until he found a stone that gave off sparks.

At the side of the cave, he collected all the dry pieces of plant, and he shredded it into tiny fluffy hairs with two rocks. Then he placed the ball of fluff on a flat rock, and he whacked the flint stone against its surface.

The sparks sprayed out, and small wisps of smoke occasionally came from the ball of fluff, but it did not ignite.

Burrell finally took a turn, but he soon stopped.

Dexter tried different techniques of doing it, and he thrust the flint over a very rough edge of a rock, creating a large cluster of sparks over the fluff.

He then gently blew the smoldering clump, until a flame ignited. And he swiftly placed it between some rocks, and he placed dry pieces of plant on it.

They collected a large pile of many different types of vegetation.

The stems of many plants, which they found below the cave, were dense, like the wood of bushes, and they burnt for a reasonable amount of time, allowing them to cook their food properly.

The island grew dark, and they blissfully rested, and Dexter satisfactorily observed rain pouring down a few meters out from the cave. However, his satisfaction did not last, as cold water came rushing down, over them, and the fire, from somewhere within the dark depths of the cave, which they had not had time to explore.

Chapter 5

The Secret Passage

Once the sun had started lighting the horizon, with its strange illuminations, Dexter began his observations of the stream of water – pouring out of the entrance – going down the beach.

It was not that it had flooded in the middle of the night that annoyed him, it was the fact that he had not thought of a way of preventing it happening again; and it surely would occur again, if they did not solve the problem.

They had to find a way to prevent it happening, or they would have to move away from the cave. The winter months would surely have a lot more rain.

His mind only came up with the same ideas, which were not any good. It seemed a small problem, which he was exaggerating.

He had been sure that the water was pouring through cracks in the rock, but it was apparent that there was a hole, at the bottom of the cave. He searched the ground about it, trying to find out where the hole went, and he discovered that the hole, which he believed was not any bigger than his head, was large, and mostly buried under sand and rocks.

Once he had removed the rocks and sand about it, he was able to fit himself into it; and he saw that it sharply angled upwards, in a tunnel. Burrell followed him in, and then Darwin ran through. The dog stayed just ahead of them, as they marched on and on, ascending to somewhere upwards, through the darkness.

Darwin eventually ran off, leaving them wondering what he would find.

They did not have to wait long. His loud barks soon appeared from somewhere ahead of them.

Yet the bark was a different bark, and he realized that the dog had encountered something. Yet it was strange!

While he rushed forward, carefully listening to his constant barking, the dark gray rock began to illuminate in reddish sunshine.

Then an entrance appeared ahead of him, where the dog’s sounds were coming from.

They proceeded to it, looking exhausted from the climb.

There was a short cavity, going upwards, with a pool of clear blue water at its center. The sides of the cavity went in a circle, going upwards for about three meters, to where the top of the cliff was.

Darwin was barking crazily at the water, at the edge of the pool.

“I don’t get it …!” Burrell remarked. “Darwin never barked like that before, without there being someone there …! He virtually has paranormal senses …!”

Dexter stared into the depths of the pool. He could clearly see through the water, but its visibility disappeared, into blackness, far down.

The dog was barking loudly, as if there was a human in it.

After they had calmed the dog, they climbed up to the surface, where there was a jungle, full of rotting vegetation.

They went to the outer fringes of it, closely checking them.

“This is perfect!” Burrell rationalized. “This will supply us with a proper fire!”

“If we can build some weapons and tools, we will be able to hunt and fix up the cave!”

“What about that stream of water?” Burrell continued, trying to solve the problem.

“There must be a way of stopping it. It’s the safest place for us to stay!”

He pondered over different ways that they could use to try to divert the water, and he removed a long piece of vegetation, with an appearance of a cane. It was thin but hard, and he knew that he could sharpen it into a spear.

“There shouldn’t be that much rain!” he finally spoke, thinking of the tremendous temperatures that they had experienced. “Therefore, we can channel the water away from the rest of the cave, and out through the entrance. Grab some vegetation – for a fire! I am starving …!”

They instantly began work, grabbing chunks of dried out vegetation, dragging it to the cavity, and dropping it onto the embankment, beside the pool. Once a large pile had gathered in it, he cut a strong rubbery vine plant, and he wrapped it around a boulder, then he fed the other end of it down the cavity, for an easier way to get up and down.

He edged his way down it, making sure that it could sustain more weight. They then, with some difficulty, took some of the vegetation, in bundles, through the dark tunnel.

Once all the vegetation was neatly stacked at the side of the cave, they carried up as many shell creatures as they could collect, in their clothes. Then Dexter dug a hole at the edge of the cave, and he placed stones in a circle about it, and then he made a fire.

Dexter devoured a feast of overcooked sea creatures, next to crackling pieces of vegetation, at the edge of the entrance, while observing the red tints of sunshine glowing from the sea. The food was one of the most welcomed meals he had eaten in a long time – even though the sea creatures could be sickening, especially when eaten in large amounts.

He continued to realize the reality of the situation – they had in fact survived it, against a situation of certain death. What had the odds been of them making it to an island? He vaguely wondered if Selina had actually realized how lucky they had been. They now had a shelter, a pool of fresh water, and some basic food.

He left the end of his stick in the fire, and once he had reasonably burnt it, he took it out; and he removed the ash, making it pointed and a reasonable spear, to accompany their other spears

He searched through the tunnel for other tunnels and holes, to divert the water to, but nothing was there. If he could only produce the right tools, he might be able to chip away the lower rock, at the bottom of the cave, and make a trench. Even though the rock might be difficult to break. It would be a slow and tiresome job. The trench might have to go down as much as a meter.

He eventually ploughed the blunt end of his spear through the sand and stones, to form a line through the cave, from the hole to the entrance. Yet, it soon became apparent, as he dug down, that he could dig deep into it, to make it into a trench, which could take a large flow of water through the cave.

None of them had any proper clothes, for surviving in the wilderness. If it had been a cold climate, they probably would have frozen to death – the water at the least would have given them hypothermia. He was sure that the island was actually somewhere in the South Pacific. Did the end of black hole drift, or had the continents shifted? In that case, they could be anywhere!

Nothing on the island was normal. Had they genetically adjusted everything? However, why had they changed everything so much? He had not seen any proper fruit or vegetables! Yet could they have made them to produce products – such as rubber – for industry? If so, they might be able to use them, perhaps to make clothing, and footwear.

What would he do if they encountered mankind? Could they adapt to its new ways and civilization? Had they changed like the vegetation? Would they be deadly? Yet why had they not seen any trace of them? Surely, there had to be types of planes and ships. However, it was possible that they were at a barren region of the world.

“We must find more food!” Basinger suddenly remarked, over to Selina. “We cannot survive on these sea creatures!”

“There is plenty of the fruit, over at the jungle! I think we should fix this place up. If we are going stay here, we should live properly! We could put some type of cover over the front, to shelter, at night.”

“Do you think that this place has a cold winter?” Burrell enquired. “I think we will have to find warm things to wear, and to sleep in. This place is strange – I haven’t seen one normal animal, or anything in fact, anywhere!”

“I want to get more wood!” Basinger announced. “There is not enough of it for tonight, and, perhaps, we can use it to seal all of the ways in here! There might be dangerous animals about that can climb into the cave. This place could be dangerous! There are tigers that can climb up trees …!”

Once they had brought down all the vegetation needed, Basinger began to look satisfied; and he took long pieces of it, and he used them to seal the entrance.

He secured the vegetation with various things, including fitting rocks against it, and fixing vines around it. He then fitted a large hollow stem above the fire, to release the smoke through it.

It was night again, when they finally finished, and they sealed the way into the tunnel.

The possibility of wild beasts existing there was now a main issue. Darwin definitely seemed to sense the presence of something! Had an animal gone into the tunnel?

As far as he was concerned the spear was a good enough weapon; and they had blocked the hole, with a large chunk of rock, which was heavy enough to prevent animals getting in.

Selina seemed to feel safe with the barricade being there, but she remained alert, at her dog’s vicious barks towards it.

He engaged himself in thinking of ways of getting food, and in thinking of ways of properly securing their hideaway against wild beasts. Winter might some day edge into their lives, and he was determined to survive. Their hunting and survival techniques would have to be greatly improved. They could use bows and arrows, and hunt the furred animals that roamed the jungle. They would greatly cherish their furs, as things to keep them warm.

He gladly viewed the morning sunshine, against the pale red shadows of the above cliff; and he squeezed through the door in the entrance. Burrell threw a large arm full of vegetation onto the smoldering ashes of the fire, and the cave soon lit up from its flames.

They would be exploring the above island, so Dexter practiced using his spear, to get the feel of it, as their survival might depend on it.

Once they had climbed up the tunnel, Darwin opened his jaws, and gave out a short growl, at the pool, and Dexter thought of making a rope ladder to get easy access to the top of the cliff.

At the top, they chose a route, along the cliff, going around the dense undergrowth. And, as they followed it, it soon became clear that it would have taken them hours to make it through it – if they could in fact have hacked their way through it.

They tracked the contours of the coastline, in the opposite direction from where they had been, when they had landed on the island. Selina wished to view the wondrous coastline, and they wished to visit a number of places. Their main intention was to find things for them to use.

A short distance from the cave, at the bottom of a gorge, Basinger discovered bits of coal, scattered about the ground. Then, on the side of a slope, further along, he discovered a coal seam. The coal was valuable, but it was not an immense amount. Yet it proved that it might be common, and that they might find a lot more.

Dexter was not sure if he was wasting his time searching for metals, but they continued to look for it along the bank of a stream, below a slope, which ran along the side of the cliff. However, when they went to cross it, they saw traces of iron ore – and he was sure that he could reduce the ore to iron, by subjecting it to a high temperature, with the coal.

The amount materials that were available vastly increased. At the cliff, he saw an abundance of limestone, at the bottom of the cliff.

They could easily remove it, in chunks, and take it to the cave. Once they had a pile of it, they could heat it on the fire and smash it into cement. They then could mix it with sand and water into mortar.

They could build a wall at the front of the cave, with a door, window, and chimney. They could easily camouflage it, by cementing thin rocks to its outside, to match the cliff.

He could build a stone stove with a chimney, which he had once seen in an old shack. However, if they were going to remain at the cliff, they had better remain hidden. If there were any humans, they might be dangerous. Even though he could not truly imagine what they would actually be like. Had civilization in fact fallen?

He started to realize that they could make some proper tools.

They could make a pair of workable bellows, to raise the temperature of the coal. If he made an adhesive, like from melting an animal carcass, and took thread from the fiber contained in the plants, they could glue and sew a big piece of animal skin into an airtight bag. They would only need to attach two flat sticks and a pipe to it. It would soon reduce the ore to a lump of iron.

They could pour it into simple moulds, made from cement, and he could make blacksmith tools, knives, arrowheads, and axes. They would be invaluable to them. Some day they might be able to build a building.

The height and thickness of the trees about them began to go beyond anything that he had heard of before. They loomed over them like immense columns, and their tops stretched out like clouds. There were many variations of their species, with their colors and shapes varying tremendously.

An immense creature, resembling a dinosaur-sized anteater, scuttled clumsily, amidst the shadows of the trees, letting out loud snorts.

Chapter 6

The Island at the End of Time

On the beach, at the jungle, they relaxed in the hot sun, after they had gathered a large supply of the fruit-like food. Even though it was a tropical paradise, similar to a hot Hawaiian shore, they would not stay anywhere near the jungle at night, unless they had to. The monster shrieks that came from its depths made them cringe. Yet the deadly beasts, which they had encountered so far, were slow, and they had been able to avoid them.

There was not anything familiar left. They did not have any idea how far they had traveled through time. How long could the sun and world survive? Dexter had heard scientists estimate how long the sun would last. How could they have been sure though? Had they in fact traveled many billions of years into the future? Could they be on the remains of the United States or Britain?

He constantly observed rocks at different locations, looking for traces of mankind in the layers of stone, as he had once looked for dinosaur fossils. He regularly thought of himself as one of the last men on the world. They had not observed any ships, planes, or remains of mankind anywhere.

Was there actually a winter? The sun seemed to stay in the same place in the sky, with the weather cycles repeating themselves. He constantly thought of different ways to prepare for winter. It was strange, thinking of there not being a winter. It was almost comical – the way the others reacted to there being changing seasons, especially when it began to be cloudy, and then they seemed to return automatically to thinking of it as being a permanent summer.

He had noticed that the moon had disappeared somewhere. They had not seen it over the entire time that they had been on the island. Had a celestial object collided with it, knocking it out of its orbit?

He was sure that if the inhabitants of the old world were all gone, that an ice age might have destroyed them. Could the island still have one of these winters? The moon had moved – could the world have also moved? Why were there not any normal fish, animals, and vegetation? Had an immense ice age destroyed everything out of existence? What was growing on the island could be what grew afterwards?

The world might have spiraled into an outer orbit, and it somehow moved back towards the sun. The island might be an example of the original planet. He had already seen dinosaur-like beasts.

He suddenly noticed that Darwin looking agitated.

He barked loudly, and went backwards and forwards, then stopped, and looked into a bush. Then he barked at something.

The bush shook, and it went still. Dirt sprayed outwards, until a dust cloud hovered over it, and a burrow was visible.

Dexter attempted to view the island differently, searching for information, and he realized that he did not have enough information about it. If it was an island: they still had not checked behind some hills!

The world beyond the island was a place of great mystery to them. It was as though they believed that the descendants of mankind lived there. They would eventually have to check the other side of the island.

Dexter realized that there were no longer any sounds from Burrell. He had gone somewhere inland. He followed his footprints, with his eyes, going along the sand, between some trees and plants, and they disappeared into the dense vegetation, which still eerily shifted, in a way that they were unable to explain.

The immensely colorful landscape surreally illuminated Selina, splashing through waves, skimming over the sand, while she moved out of the water. She finally rested at his side, with water pouring in streams over her tanned skin.

Dexter could not imagine where the island was, but it looked like somewhere near Hawaii now. Were the remains of civilization beneath the sea – out there …?

“Where is he?” Basinger grumbled.

“Shall we follow him?” Selina asked enthusiastically.

“Okay!” Basinger answered.

Basinger buried the food that they had collected under the sand. Then he handed Dexter his spear.

The beach vanished behind them, but the sounds of rushing waves remained, and they continued to follow Burrell’s footprints. They did not seem to know where he was going. The angles and separations of his prints showed that he had been in a hurry, and that he might have been desperate. Had he seen something on the island – when they had left the cave that morning, up at the cliff – as he had climbed up a tree?

The tropical-type vegetation about them started spreading out. It was a different place from the other part of the jungle.

“What is he up to …?” Basinger explained loudly, placing his hands on his hips, shaking his head from side to side.

“So he’s having fun!” Basinger mumbled. “He’s running about mad now! Look! What did I tell you …!”

His eyes popped out their sockets, gapping at the footprints, which went in wild strides over the ground. Then they went from one side of a stream to the other side, demonstrating that he had done a long jump over it.

Basinger casually walked over the stream, shaking his head, while balancing himself upright.

“Where has he gone?” his voice exploded, as he panted, trying to inhale properly. “Just think – we might have had a good day on the beach, instead of going after him!”

“Is that him there?” Selina asked.

They looked up at the top of a hill, in front of them, where a dark figure stood, facing something.

“He seems to have found something …!” Dexter spoke silently, keeping himself uninvolved.

There would be a good explanation for Burrell doing what he was doing. One of his jokes might have annoyed Basinger. He had been awake for most of the night.

The hill ascended more than they had noticed, and they strained themselves climbing it.

A full view of the island below started to appear, and it curved out, for five miles across.

He saw that it was the highest hill in a region that was flat.

When they reached the top, they were all tired and hungry.

“What is that …?” Basinger mumbled, pointing to a structure, marching across to it.

“Is that structure made of the same material as the tower?” Selina asked exhausted, reaching the top.

“Yes, it is!” Dexter replied, from behind her.

He saw a small forest of vegetation surrounding the square structure. Then he saw that the forest had a pool of water in it, and that the land looked moist. His excitement grew, when he saw some of the edible plants that they had discovered. Then he saw food on the trees. It was a good place for them to stay!

It had a full view of their part of the island. The ground was fertile, and he thought about planting the seeds that he had collected. There only were small amounts of them, but they could easily get more. Their real problem would be to find enough meat.

Dexter watched Basinger and Burrell squabbling. Then they stood at its edge, silently discussing something, and they went around the structure.

He tiredly strolled over to Selina, and they eventually followed them around the structure.

Its foundations had slightly sunk into the ground at one side, and it was resting at an angle. Fawn mud surrounded its base, and he searched it for prints. Selina followed him and Darwin.

He could not imagine them scaling it, as it was too high, and it loomed above like a giant black box, with a smooth surface.

As he went around the corner, he saw that Basinger and Burrell were in a knee-high hole, arguing about how they should continue digging. They agreed about something, and then they showed him and Selina their discovery.

At the side of the structure, where Burrell had dug the hole, he saw faint lines, which was obviously a closed entrance. And he knew, by their attitude, that it was the only way that they could enter it.

He rummaged through some sticks, scattered about the outer vegetation, for a strong one. He settled for a stick similar to the one that Burrell was using, and he knelt at the side of them, and pulled muck from it, pushing it onto a heap, at his other side. He scraped and dug at the soil, but he barely made any distinguishable progress.

The trees hanging overhead allowed the sun through.

Then dimness went across the edge of his sight again, as a gust of wind rushed past, blowing the trees across the sun, and Basinger suddenly fell backwards, and the entrance opened.

Dexter instantly dropped his stick into the hole.

Then he saw Selina, pushing a stick into the structure, where she had found an opening mechanism. They had not seen her, and Basinger had fallen into it, to where the light met the dimness inside. He had been resting on it, while it had opened.

Its interior was remarkably clean, but incredibly dark and gloomy. There were no signs of water or dirt anywhere. The structure had to be airtight.

“Are you all right?” Selina asked, helping Basinger.

“Yes, I am fine!”

“Good timing!” Dexter congratulated Selina.

The sun’s beams radiated over them, and as Dexter moved into it, his eyesight adjusted to its dimness – and a large interior became visible.

“What’s that there?” Burrell exclaimed, from behind him.

It obviously was another entrance, which they soon found they could not open, and which did not seem to have anything to open it.

Basinger finally led them out of it, and they went around the structure.

“Do you want to go back to the cave to get a rope?” Burrell explained. “I made one long enough to throw over the top – to the other side – and we can fasten it to a tree.”

“Why do we want to climb up onto the roof?” Basinger asked. “This is pointless …!”

“We could live here – instead of in that cave! There may be artifacts in it, which we could use …!”

“Why would there be a door on the roof? What would artifacts be doing in there, on top of an island?”

“We do not need to go back to the cave …!” Selina called out, towards Dexter, from an area at the trees.

“Why do we not need to go back …?” Basinger moaned.

“There’s an old tree that we could climb up!”

After they had surveyed the fallen over tree, they gripped its wide trunk, and they pulled it over to the structure, where they lifted the end of it onto the top of the structure.

Basinger gripped the tree, and climbed up, using his arms and legs. Then Dexter began climbing it.

At the top, he instantly saw two small pillars, and that one of them looked like an entrance. Basinger went over to the entrance, while he watched Dexter examining the rest of it.

Dexter heard Selina and Burrell coming up the structure.

“Have you tried pushing it?” Burrell enquired patiently.

“Yes, at every angle …!” Basinger replied.

Basinger tried again, and he felt its edge with his fingers. Burrell found a stick, and he tried to insert it in parts of it, then he gave up.

“Is that a keyhole?” Selina spoke, as she approached them, pointing at a mark, about half a meter away from them.

Dexter took the stick from Burrell, and he carefully inserted it into the hole; then he twirled it about.

A shuffling sound came from it, and a dark interior appeared, where the line of the entrance was; and Dexter saw a dark tunnel, going down into it.

“Well, how do we get down – never mind back up again?” Basinger asked.

“There’s something!” Burrell replied, holding his face close.

A shine came off a pole, with handles going down its side.

Basinger leant forward, and he grabbed it. Then he poked his leg into the entrance, putting it down upon a lower handle, and he climbed into it.

Dexter waited until he had vanished below somewhere, and he climbed into it, and rushed down after him.

At the bottom, he thought he saw Basinger standing, holding something, in a large black-walled room, but when he went near him, he saw him examining a machine, which resembled a black jukebox.

Various machines became visible about him, at different positions about the floor, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

They had the same black material as the structure, which he believed was one of the few materials to survive.

“If this is a computer – it may speak some English …!”

What did Basinger actually want to know? He had intensely investigated everything he had come across. He was sure that Basinger was going to activate everything on it.

A high-pitched whistle screeched out startling him.

The machine burst into life, making hair-raising sounds, which had similarities to cat purrs, and creature tones; while a vivid green light flashed about bright illuminations, with shadows of Basinger’s figure in it.

“This thing may be dangerous! It may be better to just leave it – until we can at least test it – it could be anything!”

“Of course, you are right! It could be very dangerous! And I do not have the slightest idea what it is!”

Once the machine had ceased reacting, with its lights and sounds, one light remained illuminated on it. And they ignored it, and climbed back up the pole. But while they were struggling to get out of the entrance, a giant black shadow became visible, and they observed a twenty-meter disc soaring above the structure.

Chapter 7

The Unknown Species of Human

In the crest of the morning sky, a bright whiteness soared against the upper atmosphere. For a brief moment its spectacular features deceived Dexter, making him believe that it was an aircraft, shining in the bright sun, but its distinct flame gave away its identity, and that it was another immense meteorite.

Dexter felt a sensation of balancing over the world, as he towered over the darkened view of the island. The warm sea breeze gently blew at his face. A rustle of dried animal skins came from him. He once again saw how visible the structure now was, with its dish activated.

He thought about building a plough, to plant the seeds that he would collect. His foot touched a small meteorite, embedded in the soil, at the edge of the hill, and he again wondered why the meteorites were so common, and the stars so densely packed. The others, who were resting in the structure, occasionally looked for them in the sky, as though they were a danger. But, as far as he knew, none of them had landed within a mile of them, so far.

So far he had only discovered one animal that might pull a plough, but he had only caught sight of the one. The beast resembled a miniature ox, but the animal had looked as though it might tire easy.

He believed that the structure was a good place to stay, especially with the lower entrance now open. However, it was not hidden, now that its dish was out; and they would regret it, if there were in fact dangerous occupants on the world. Yet their fears that there were humans left were gradually decreasing. They had not found one trace of humans. He was sure that the structure was a form of communications station. Dexter believed that it ought to be able to receive something – if there was anything in that part of the world.

If they had used helicopters to land on its roof, there might have been other bases near it.

Whatever it had been communicating with, surely had to have been in the direction of the other side of the island, where it was facing. However, they did not want to give away their presence, by using it. They did not know what they were dealing with yet.

He listened to faint tones from Basinger and Burrell, mingled with distant surges of waves, but their voices were too vague to hear properly. However, he could imagine what they were saying. They would be discussing the food that they had collected from the remaining vegetation.

He felt like searching the entire landscape for all the edible plants that there were. Their survival might some day rely on it.

While he went to leave, his foot dragged over the ground, pushing something open under the muck, revealing a deep hole. He pushed it further forward, shoving his weight against it, and it moved under the surface of the ground.

It had to be the cover of something; but he could only see a deep gap under it. However, as he removed the mud from about it, a perfect square shape became visible. He felt that it had a perfectly flat surface, without any blemishes; and as he wiped the mud from it, he saw that it had a shiny surface.

He knelt on the dirt, and he hypnotically peered at his reflection. There was no corrosion to it – it had to be part of the structure.

His unusual behavior soon drew the attention of the others. Basinger and Burrell casually strolled out of the structure, while they tried to see what he was doing; and Selina followed them. At their approach, Basinger saw the shiny side of it, and he briskly increased their pace.

They stopped at the same distance about him.

“What could it be?” Selina spoke, breaking the silence.

“What would whatever it is be doing there?” Burrell asked, looking around himself, and he watched Basinger push his head down into its narrow space.

“It’s deep …!” Basinger explained, rubbing his fingers along its outer edge, covering his hand in muck. “Wait …! I can hear some sounds, from something far below!”

There were no signs of anything at the bottom of it, and no apparent ladder, or way to get down into it. Dexter knelt next to him, and he pulled out a rock embedded in the ground, and he balanced it between his hands, then he carefully dropped it down its center. He listened, with his ear close to it, and he heard a faint thud.

“Let’s get some of the vines over there …?” Burrell spoke anxiously. “There has to be something at the bottom of it!”

“It might only have been a type of drain …!” Selina argued, from behind him.

“Why would they have made it out of metal, or whatever it is?”

“It might have been used to pump up water!” Basinger quickly answered.

“That would mean that there was something else here!” Burrell disclosed. “Well, why have we not found any bricks, metal, or anything …?”

“They might have moved it away!”

“You have a point there!” Dexter replied. “Will we get all the vine …?”

“What will we attach it to?” Selina asked, looking about her. “There is nothing here!”

“Yes, there is …!” Basinger exclaimed.

“Where …?”

Basinger bent over, and he pointed at what looked like a lump of metal, on the edge of it. He cleaned mud away from it, to show them a loop of the material, which obviously had something like a cable attached to it.

As they went towards the vegetation, Darwin ran out of some nearby bushes, and he reluctantly followed them. Dexter considered the discovery from various angles, trying to give himself some kind of idea of what it was they were dealing with. He accepted that it might have been a source of water.

If the island had many other structures, he was sure that it could have been a water pipe leading to a water supply. However, why did it need such a large pipe?

Once they had piled up the rope-like vine at its edge, they fixed it together, into one large rope, which Basinger attached securely to the loop.

Dexter fitted a harness, made from a piece of the vine, around his shoulders, and he attached it onto the rope. They then fed the vine down into it. The entire length of the pile fitted into it, but they were not sure if it reached the bottom.

After he had prepared himself, and he had fitted himself into the small space of the tunnel, using his back and legs to balance himself, he began to abseil into its darkness.

Dried dirt covered the sides of it, which flaked off, coating his back and legs.

Combinations of natural light mingled about him. His breathing grew loud, and he listened to the others discus his descent.

Darwin’s head peered down at him, resting over the edge. For a second, he looked as though he was going to pounce down at him.

Dexter occasionally stopped to balance himself, against the sides. Then he allowed the rope to whirl around the vine buckle, jerking occasionally, as a small knot went through it. The rope was strong enough, and he had checked it enough.

The exit shrank to a point of light, leaving him in a dim radiance. Just as he was slowing himself, the dim sides cleared of mud, and its shiny surface appeared, reflecting his face.

A faint sound of a voice came from above, and the walls vanished. Blackness engulfed him, and he stopped his descent. His body dangled back and forth, in the cool air, and he only heard silence about him. The noises from above went, and he heard the wind blowing through it.

He released the rope, through his clenched hand, and it spun about as he continued downwards. His body then jerked, and the large knot at the end of the rope caught in the harness.

His surroundings had not changed, and he looked downwards. An outline of something was below him, which surely was the ground, and he cursed himself for not getting more vine.

However, he realized that he could jump down as the ground was only at a distance of his height, and he unfastened the lower knot. The knot unfastened, and the vine slipped away, and he flew down, onto a pile of dry dirt.

Then he stretch his arm upwards, and discovered that the end of the rope was out of reach. He had badly underestimated the height of it. Even jumping at it, his hand was a meter away from it. He then realized that they could not hear him.

However, Basinger would eventually come down.

What was he in? He saw a floor, beneath the dirt, and he followed it along, observing traces of the ground. There were signs that it had been recently flooded with water. He was in a circle-shaped room, which he believed was a type of storage place, for something.

It was empty, with no other apparent entrances. It was like the remaining lower part of some type of structure. At his original position, he saw the rope, where it had been, dangling down from the above tunnel. They had obviously not moved it. There was nothing else left to do. He would just have to wait, to find out what the others would do.

As he tried to see the ground properly, he saw a faint shape in a mound of muck, which he had passed. Its peculiar shape became apparent, and he rubbed his fingers over a flat part of it, making bits of dried dirt crumble from it, revealing a shiny surface.

He tugged at its corner, and it broke away, leaving the lower floor revealed.

The materials that the object and structures were made of were fascinating. They could have been there for many millions of years.

He took a piece of his clothing, and he wiped the rest of the crusts of mud from it, revealing a line of dials, which he pushed and turned. The object seemed not to function, but as he moved away, his legs hit something. His legs seemed to have sunk into the muck, but he felt the ground below his feet. He then found that the muck that was in front of him was actually resting a few inches over the ground. Some mysterious force was lifting it. It firmly fixed the dirt where it was, and it withstood him stamping on it.

After he carefully considered it, he individually touched the dials, which he had moved, and the layer of dirt lifted up further.

Dexter realized that he should be able to use it to get to the rope.

Once he had positioned himself beneath the rope, he changed the angle of the device, so that it covered the area beneath him; and he gradually lifted himself. However, the device worked slowly, which was why he had not seen what it had done. So he pushed the dial that had activated it right into it, as hard as he could, and it nearly flew out of his hands, as he swiftly went up.

He tightly gripped the device, and he narrowly avoided hitting the side, as he went up into the tunnel.

The light blinded him, and the others jumped back from him, as he shot out. And their startled faces glared up at him, as he lifted him up into the air.

He swiftly deactivated the dial once his eyes had adjusted to the light. Then he stopped ascending, and he remained standing. The others remained staring up at him, with their hands over their eyes, and he gradually lowered his height, with the dial.

In the light, with the dirt cleaned from it, the device had a resemblance to a type of black musical keyboard.

“It has to be an anti-gravitational device!” Burrell explained, staying at a distance.

“Incredible!” Basinger gasped. “We have to get of this island, to explore the outside world …! Think of the inventions that may exist …! That machine may have an insignificant capability compared to the lifting potential of other machines! How can such a miniature machine be capable of moving such heavy weights?”

Dexter hovered over the ground, and he went forwards – and he tried the different controls on it. The device was only capable of lifting objects in front of it, and the other controls could maneuver the objects about, to adjust their positions and angles. He was positive that it only was a tool, used as a lifting device.

He could not establish if they recharged it. There was not anything on it, to connect anything to it. There also were no screws or anything, and it had no gaps in it.

“How strong do you think it is?” Burrell finally asked, looking at a large boulder.

“I think that its power is running out! It was moving sluggishly when I first used it!”

“It would be a good idea not to use it!” Basinger continued. “We may need it some day!”

Vivid green flashes from a machine brilliantly illuminated the entire interior of the structure.

Its flashes stopped, and it shined a pale green light over them. Its long rectangular shape now had control lights activated all over it. Burrell sat on a large board, in front of it. His hand lifted a head-shaped device, which he had recently found in a compartment, in its surface; and he eagerly placed it upon his head.

“What do you think it is?” Selina whispered to Dexter.

“It looks good …!” he replied, as he saw more head devices.

In the dim green light, he saw Basinger reluctantly take one of the devices, and place it on his head.

When Burrell activated a series of switches, Basinger suddenly jerked backwards, looking alarmed at something. He held the device at his head, waiting to remove it, and he forced himself to keep it there.

“What is it?” Selina asked anxiously, from behind him.

Basinger’s voice made a series of eerie sounds, and Burrell looked over at him, in surprise. Then he replied, with similar sounds, and Basinger seemed to know what he meant.

Basinger’s face showed that he was deeply concentrating, as though the room were not there.

They sat at the machine, occasionally peering at each other, making strange sounds. The machine had somehow taught them a new language. However, it was nothing like any language that he had ever heard.

Dexter finally picked up a head device, in the dim light, and to his surprise, he realized that the device almost was twice the size of his head.

Burrell glanced at him, and he activated the machine.

A silent hum seemed to come from the roof, and Dexter felt a surge of something go through his mind. Strange shapes of light, like ghosts, appeared and vanished about him. Their shapes and colors were too visible for his mind to be creating them.

He waited for the machine to stop before he removed the device from him.

Basinger’s face seemed flushed, and he turned towards him. Then he looked directly into Dexter’s eyes, and he started to make one of the sounds.

“Welcome to the future!” Burrell swiftly spoke.

Basinger’s complexion changed back to normal.

“You will only have learned this language …!” Basinger assured him, in the new language, as he held his head. “This machine implants information within the mind, so that you can instantly learn vast amounts of information!”

Dexter somehow knew that he was correct, and when he glanced at the machine, he knew how to use some of its controls.

For some reason a switch at his front drew his attention. It was as though he had actually forgotten what it was. He sensed that he wanted to activate it, and he put out his finger; and he gently touched it.

A light brightly spread across a wall, from the machine. It was projecting a circle of swirling lights, and he sensed that it was not functioning properly. Just as he was going to correct it, Burrell did it first, and it instantly adjusted, into an image of a creature.

For a few seconds, he stared at it in utter horror – he could not believe what he saw – the creature could not possibly be a descendent of the human race. The creature could barely walk properly. Where had its green claws, jaws, and warty skin originated? Had some form of catastrophe turned mankind into genetic mutants?

Burrell resumed analyzing the complex machinery, which he had found hidden in the dimness, and he randomly experimented with their controls.

Basinger’s peculiar behavior had kept Dexter awake. He had been actively sifting through information into the early hours of the morning, rummaging through projected symbols.

Dexter could not make out if he had actually found anything. He had attempted several times to get his attention, but he had been too busy, and had ignored him.

“Is there anything about what happened to civilization?” Dexter finally asked, approaching him.

Basinger reluctantly stopped what he was doing.

“Yes, I did find information that was incredibly interesting, which could hold a clue to why civilization fell, or changed!”

“What was it?”

“Well, by what I saw, I would say that they were doing genetic experiments, to advance civilization …! There is no information about what happened to mankind. There is evidence that they carried out some experiments in this region. I believe that they were trying to create a superlative race, and that they were trying to extinguish the flaws that their race and civilization had. Their experiments were disastrous though, but they continued, trying to achieve their goal! They made experiments to animals, trying to get a solution. I believe that these creatures, we saw, are the results of these experiments. Civilization fell, after it had survived for an immense amount of time! I do not exactly know how it happened …!”

“That’s far-fetched!” Dexter exclaimed. “I would like to see more evidence, before I believe anything!”

Basinger suddenly looked as though he had remembered something.

“Do you recall when this machine first mentioned them – when the projection first showed us the creature from its records?”

“Yes!”

“Well, it mentioned one of the super-species …! I think that they created them!”

“Are you sure …?”

“If some of them still exist, they may be able to answer our questions!”

“That may be dangerous!”

“Some of the new species may be …!”

“What else have you found?” he enquired, out of curiosity.

“Actually, I think I might have …! I checked a list of machine diagrams, looking for the machines in here, and guess what …?”

“What did you find?”

“There was some form of black hole mentioned beside one of the diagrams! I am sure that they used it to instantaneously transport objects from one region to another.”

Dexter just stared at him, startled at the thought of encountering another black hole.

“How could they use it to transport objects – it moves things through time?”

“They must have found a way to get rid of its time travel properties. Then they must have put the exit end of it in another machine. I am not positive – it only vaguely explained it! Yet think of what all the scientists’ black hole experiments could have achieved, since we left! In that amount of time …!”

“They had black holes then!” he spoke, shrugging his shoulders.

“If it still exists, we may be able to use it!”

“Use it for what?” he asked loudly, startling the others.

“We could use it to travel back in time!”

“You want us to go into another black hole, to travel back in time! That’s impossible!”

“How can it be used to travel back in time?” Selina asked.

“If they were able to control black holes, they might also have been able to use it for time travel!”

“Are you sure that it would not need another machine – to pass through to – with the exit end of the black hole?” Dexter asked.

“The exit end, which we could travel to, is back where we left!”

“Even if we do find this black hole machine,” Burrell suddenly replied, “and it’s still functioning, how will we know if it’s capable of doing what you say? We could end up in a worse situation …!”

“We can look for information about its functions! I am going to search their records for more information about it. We may be able to discover if it will work!”

“If you insist!” Dexter answered. “But I think that you will find out that it may not work! We have already been through enough, and I do not want to go through any more black holes! We can survive, and we can find out what happened to mankind.”

Burrell stood up, and he angrily left, towards the other side of the room, to get some water.

“We can start by checking these machines!” Basinger swiftly mumbled. “There is more information in here than you realize! These machines may hold vital information! We also have not found out what this structure is yet!”

Shadows of branches stretched out, through the vegetation, beyond the entrance. Squabbling sounds came from somewhere, and Dexter realized that they only were the distant noises of Selina and Burrell discussing something.

Basinger’s figure abruptly leapt from his seat at the machine. He adjusted his sight, towards the screen.

“There – a mention of a black hole machine, located in this sector!” he called out, rhythmically slapping his hand on the machine.

“That does not prove that it still exists,” Dexter replied, “or that it has a power supply, which we can use! The energy that it consumes must be tremendous! I don’t believe that we can go back in time – there is no proof anywhere!”

“We do not fully know how the black hole actually works, do we? We only know theories about it and time travel. There really is nothing that suggests that we cannot travel backwards!”

“I will believe it when you show some evidence! Why were they not able to stop their civilization from falling – if they could travel, back and forward, in time? And if these black hole machines existed, why are there none of the past inhabitants roaming this world?”

“They may have been unable to stop it happening – even with a time machine! They only did things for logical reasons, which would eliminate them traveling about for the sake of it.”

“You could be right, but I still don’t believe it!”

A loud thud made them simultaneously look up, towards the entrance, where Burrell had bumped into a wall.

Something like a grunt came from him. Basinger instantly understood the situation, and he walked towards him, speaking in a low tone, so that Dexter could not hear him.

Dexter glanced at the machine diagram, which Basinger had put on the wall. The representation barely resembled anything, and the symbols representing the black hole in it were barely believable.

He put on the head device beside him, and it gave him some vague information about it. It being called a Star Chamber grabbed his attention more than anything else. If they had been as logical as Basinger kept on mentioning, then there must have been a good reason for them to use that name.

He briefly wondered again what the structure was for, and why it had a giant dish. Could it have been a military base, for monitoring space? He began activating the machine, to get it to show him more machine outlines. He examined their shapes, increasing the speed, at which they appeared. Just as Basinger stopped speaking to Burrell, he saw an interesting shape.

He immediately saw that it was a vehicle, and he turned on the head device, to get information about it. A surge of facts filled his mind, and he realized how the vehicle functioned, and that it had to be occasionally charged somewhere.

He wondered what other information Basinger had found out about the Star Chambers.

Darwin’s barks gave him the impression that he was in some danger, outside, but he knew that it was just Burrell.

Basinger took some food, which Dexter had taken from nearby plants.

“It has a strange taste!” Basinger spoke, chewing a piece.

Burrell instantly entered the structure, and Selina then walked in, making faces at him, behind him. Dexter saw that he was holding a small creature by the neck, which also curiously looked as though it had been making faces at him, before he had killed it with a spear.

Burrell threw it over the surface of a machine, glaring at it, seeing if it was still alive. Dexter had not seen its species before, and he wondered what it was.

He ate a piece of food that resembled an apricot. Its bitter taste made him want to remove it out of his mouth.

Basinger suddenly pressed a switch, which he had not seen been activated.

It projected a swirling blur of light onto the wall, which formed into an image of a similar structure, and one of the creatures moved into view, wearing a golden robe; and he observed its repulsive features. The creature he had originally seen now seemed only mildly hideous. It looked different in the daylight, with its green, slimy, warty skin glowing. He had not seen anything like it before.

Its massive form made perfect jerks forward, on its four limbs, and claws, going up a ramp, like a tiger clambering up a tree. It was apparent that they had actually designed the ramp for their limbs. Furthermore, it shot up one of the pole ladders, which they also had obviously designed for them to use, with the least amount of space.

Basinger stayed sitting at the machine, holding his head, and Dexter briefly wondered why he was so anxious. Then he returned to watching the others getting food.

A circle of light beamed out, onto the wall. Symbols began flashing on it, as Basinger pressed buttons. It then changed to columns of symbols.

Dexter realized that he had not found anything that even suggested that an ice age had engulfed the world. However, Basinger had the knack of using it, and he now was searching through massive amounts of its data, with useless details about the inhabitants of the region.

The incredible characteristic that they had shown had been the machine-like way they had done everything. There were no signs that they had carried out any real leisure pursuits, and they appeared to do the work that they had needed to do.

“I have found something!” Basinger mumbled excitedly.

Dexter looked at the projection on the wall, and he saw the interior of a structure.

“What is it?”

“It’s a place that’s a sort of storage depot, where they kept some important machines!”

“That does not prove that it will have a Star Chamber in it!” he quickly replied. “Why would it be in a storage depot?”

“They used it to move objects to distant places. It vaguely mentions moving things up into space!”

Chapter 9

The Sunken City

A dark shape, at the edge of a hill, vaguely resembled the top of a structure. Yet, as they got close, Dexter realized that it was something else, and he tried to guess.

The last people had to have been more unexciting than he had been imagining. There were no signs of any types of shops, restaurants, bars, products, and anything else to do with leisure. Had things actually turned as uninteresting as he had observed? He tried to compare everything that he had seen to the things that had existed. How could they have changed so much? Had some sort of state control taken over?

However, all the things to do with leisure might have been made of inferior materials that had crumbled into the ground. Gaps turned visible all over the island, which were in the shape of things. But all he found were stones and muck, when he searched for any remains.

He caught a glimpse of a wisp of smoke, but he ignored it. The island had volcano vents, at its shore, further up from the jungle. They were now positive that it was not a Hawaiian island, or on the fault line there.

At the hill, a long object became observable, within some bright yellow bush vegetation.

It definitely was not any form of building, but it had the same material as everything else, left of the civilization. It had a resemblance to a bus, but it had a perfectly flat roof, and flat sides, which had window holes along them. It had to be a form of transport.

There was no visible means of entering it, and he searched through the bushes first, to try to find some type of rail leading to it. But if it had been metal, it would have corroded.

It was incredible how much the landscape had changed. He could barely see anywhere a vehicle could travel. He decided to look for its wheels, and he was mildly surprised not to find any on it – or any places where they could have been.

The others finally found a trace of an entrance, under dirt, covering the end of it. Basinger fiddled with its lock, and it automatically sprung open, with an engine sound, which proved that there still was power in it. It was hopeless, but it was worth investigating.

Its interior resembled a vehicle for transporting goods, except for long seats that went along its sides. He strolled along it, for six meters, to the front, to where another seat went across its front. Its front had numerous switches and dials.

It looked familiar, and Dexter sat at it, as the others sat about him. They eagerly looked at its controls, and he felt as though he were sitting in an old vehicle on a dump.

“It is the right size,” Burrell spoke tiredly, “but it is too heavy. If we were to find another one, near the beach, it may make a good boat. It’s waterproof, and it’s made of this material …!”

“They must have had boats!” Basinger stated, looking out at the outside. “And it would be an extremely good idea to search for one!”

“But will there be any of them about here?” Burrell explained. “This place is empty!”

“It would still be a good idea to look for one!”

“Where will we get sails for it?” Selina asked.

“If we find one with power, we wouldn’t need to … This thing may move – somehow!”

“Why do we need to travel by sea?” Selina responded. “If there are flying machines, like that lifting device, they may do everything that we desire.”

“Exactly!” Dexter interjected. “A boat, even made out of this material, can still sink – especially in a storm!”

He glanced about, and he started eating some of his food.

In the dim light, coming through a window hole, Basinger sketched a faint outline of something, on a piece of animal skin, stretched over the seat.

“If we could only build a yacht,” Selina explained, “it would be fast and safe!”

“That’s a good idea!” Basinger replied, captivated in his work. “However, I do not believe that we are capable of producing one, with the materials that are available to us. But we could of course make it as close to one as we can make it!”

Dexter agreed with him, by nodding, as he recalled seeing a wooden fishing boat that he was sure they could copy.

“My uncle took me out in his yacht,” Selina spoke sleepily to Burrell, “when I was at high school! He showed me how easy it was to put it upright again – if it capsized …!”

“Other boats can also be safely used to travel around the world,” Basinger continued. “If they are built good enough, they should withstand some of the worst storms …!

“We can make types of wooden bolts to fix it together. We can also get a good supply of strong glue from animal bones, and there are thick tar and rubber substances, which can be obtained in vast amounts from some of the trees!”

“What dimensions are we making it?” Burrell enthusiastically enquired.

“I have worked out the dimensions of it!” Basinger swiftly answered, turning his head, to stare at Burrell. “They are the dimensions needed to hold everything that we need, including all the food supplies that we need. So there are not any problems about that! It must be as unsinkable as we can possibly make it!”

After Basinger had finished drawing a rough outline of it, he stood up, and he stepped back from it.

“This will do, for the moment! We will obviously have to do a lot more, more accurate, plans!”

For a few minutes, Basinger considered it, and he shrugged his shoulders.

Dexter did not know what they were going to finally achieve, but Basinger had already been searching for the best materials to make it, and he had a vague idea of the type of boat that it actually might turn out like, from the types of wood that he had been considering.

They would still have to test the different samples of wood, and evaluate their strength; and their being cut and fixed together in various ways. They probably would separately examine the samples, and they would give their different thoughts about them.

Dexter had successfully made tools out of the basic materials that they had found, which would cut and shape the wood; and he thought of different designs of wooden benches that he could easily make, to help cut the wood into various sizes.

They would probably work together, collecting the wood, but as the work progressed, they would prefer to do the various jobs on their own, at various locations, and they would regularly swap jobs, until they would be doing the work that they preferred doing.

Once they had accumulated a good pile of accurately cut wood, they would have to build a fire on the beach, to heat the planks, then start bending them into the shape of the hull; and carry out the rigorous work of fixing them together, while putting a waterproof sealant between the junctions. They might then test the caulked sections for their efficacy in preventing water entering, and cover them in tar, from the trees.

At night, they could make things for it, such as slowly making the sails, by thinning especially tough animal skins, which they could then sew together, and use a rubbery tree substance to make waterproof.

He would do everything that he could to prevent any leaks occurring to it. They could roll the hull down to the water, on logs, and he could check it, for leaks, in the water. He could also test its capabilities, and test it to find out what modifications it might need. They could then use winches to return it to the cliff edge.

Basinger’s sketch of it showed that he was going to add an airtight cabin that would cover the majority of the boat, to hold their supplies, and for them to use as their quarters.

He would refuse to celebrate its completion until they had fully tested it in the sea, with a heavy wind blowing it fast through large waves.

Even though he had various clues, he was not sure where he now was on the world. However, he knew what direction Basinger would travel in, and that he would take them beyond the other side of the island. He was sure that a Star Chamber was in that direction, somewhere. Dexter was sure that he had seen faint images there, behind the misty horizon, and he was sure that it was the mainland.

Dexter observed Burrell pressing a control lever, next to him, as he had been doing with the other machines in the structure. However, he only realized what he had done when he heard the entrance loudly shut behind them, and he felt the vehicle lift into the air. It seemed to float over the ground.

Selina and Burrell stuck their heads through the gap at the front, where some type of window had been. For a few seconds, he thought about climbing out of it, through the gap, but he stayed seated, watching the controls. Selina and Burrell joined Basinger, behind him.

Half of the controls had long lines of glowing switches.

Suddenly, Dexter recognized the controls about him – from information that he had taken in from the machine in the structure – it was the vehicle that he had seen there! Moreover, he knew what switch would make it take them to the structure, where a Star Chamber was; and he swiftly activated it, before anyone objected to the idea.

A loud shudder furiously shook them up and down, until they were gripping the seats. Then it finally calmed, to a fast vibration.

To his surprise, the vegetation rattled along its edges, and it broke free; and it rapidly increased its velocity. Yet, to his astonishment, it plunged down the steep slope of the hill, going down towards the shore.

Once the vehicle was going at an unbelievable speed, they avoided looking outside, and held onto it. He could not think straight, and he tried to think of a way of stopping it if something went in its path.

Its wild movements, maneuvering about the landscape, threw them from side to side; and, to his great pleasure, the vehicle went over an area where he was sure a building once had been, proving that it might not be just following a route.

The vehicle finally decreased its velocity to maneuver around an obstacle, which completely blocked its path. He was now positive that some type of computer was steering it around objects, but he was not positive where it was taking them, and if they could ever return.

As it went along, he observed the scenery, about its front, at every angle, but he was unable to recognize anything. He had never seen the place before.

Areas of vegetation stretched out over vast regions, and he saw familiar plants and creatures in them. He now knew many new places where they could hunt the animals that they wanted.

An area of small hills opened out, at its front, and the sun shone, from behind some small clouds, lighting everything. Suddenly, a dark figure of a creature moved through some bushes. Its unusual movements and behavior grabbed his attention, and he could not recall seeing it before, but it was vaguely familiar.

As he attempted to remember, more of the creatures appeared, from places about their sides. Some of them were standing upwards, using their mouths to communicate. Yet what startled him the most was the fact that some of them were wearing animal skins.

They reminded him of a tribe of ape-men, but it then became apparent that their heads were more like hairy alligators, with dark green tints to their skin and hair.

The creatures were turning around everywhere, about the vehicle, and they stared in through the windows. The crowd grew dense, in front of them, and one of them went in front of the vehicle; and it swerved around it. Its features stuck in his mind, and he realized that it was similar to the creature that had been on the machine’s projection, in the structure.

The creature stood steady, with its top limbs at its sides, staring at them, behind the vehicle.

A sudden jolt, made him jerk forwards, and the vehicle almost stopped.

“What in the hell were they?” Burrell yelled out, jumping up from where he was sitting.

The crowd of creatures were pursuing them, with increasing speed, as the vehicle maneuvered about a hill.

As it floated on, and it increased its speed, Dexter realized that he was now even more confused than he had been. Why were there two races of them? Had that race descended from the other race?

The creatures definitely were not descended from mankind. Their features were not the same, and they obviously had their own ancestors that had to be a four-legged creature with claws, and their jaws were similar to a reptile.

Surely the machines in the structure would have some information about this other race. He realized again that the world now had many deadly creatures. He was beginning to believe that they should have stayed there. This entire race might now know of their presence! Could they actually return? If they left this island, would they eventually meet a more deadly race? Yet if they stayed here these creatures might find them.

As the vehicle moved further away from them, he realized that the creatures were more advanced than he had thought, and that he was exaggerating the situation. Some of the creatures had greeted them.

He realized that the creatures were definitely the ancestors of the other creatures, who had built the structure. They were like a tribe of ape-men, of their race. He had heard them make three silent grunts, which had been a greeting, which he was sure that the other race had adapted into their language.

As the vehicle went out towards the other side of the island, he saw the other massive tower, in the distance, and he realized that it had only been a large version of the tower in the jungle, at the beach.

The vehicle moved over endless lines, covered in fawn dirt and sand, which he was sure once had been old streets.

He did not believe that the creatures, which had built the civilization, would actually kill them. The others had given many nervous glances at the projected creature. He could not imagine them fighting and killing them. So far he had not seen with any weapons.

A hand appeared beside his head, which he recognized as Basinger’s. He pointed outwards, and Dexter gasped, when he saw that it was heading towards the sea, which was less than a few miles away, behind some hills of sand.

Basinger stood at his side, and he pressed another of the buttons, but the vehicle continued on going. He then began pushing buttons and levers, as the sea slowly stretched out in front of them, and the vehicle continued to race towards it. Dexter knew that the other controls, which were not destination buttons, only adjusted the way that it maneuvered, and, for some reason, none of them would stop it. Moreover, he did not know if it had enough power.

The wind sprayed water against Dexter’s hand, at the back of the vehicle, and he watched it move over the waves.

Burrell sat down, at the front, where he had been.

The water was clear, but it was too far out, across the sea, to see the bottom. A large group of multicolored sea creatures swam alongside it, and then shifted away to the right.

Darwin peered over the edge of a window, and he went back to smelling about him. The island grew small, and turned to another shape about them. Their plan, of moving away from the island, was taking place – but the mainland had not been at the horizon, where they had believed it had been.

He realized that it might have been the creatures’ fire that he had seen on the island, when they had arrived at the island. But it could also have been a volcanic eruption near the shore.

The strangeness of it grabbed him, as he vividly recalled its surreal glow beaming out, from the island. It had looked deliberate, like a beacon, though. He had sometimes wondered if it actually had been a fire. Furthermore, how did the others get ashore?

He rested, and imagined himself skimming over the sea, with the island sinking into the sea, behind him.

What kind of strange place existed beneath the waves, down at the seabed? If he only had his scuba-diving gear at the island …

The red sunshine brightly shone down, engulfing the sky, in tints of crimson. Shadows and reflections of small clouds wavered on the surface of the water.

The strange redness seemed to be in every shadow and reflection, and especially in the sparkles of the waves, swirling about under it. A cloud’s reflection mingled with the sunlight in whirling eddies.

A slight scent of the water was in the warm air, rushing through it, from the front. For a second, he thought that he caught a glimpse of something at the most distant point of the horizon.

The island completely disappeared, and nothing could be seen anywhere, on the water. With his eyes shut it was as though it were not moving but hovering on a breeze.

A gust of wind appeared, at the side, and he heard the sea gurgling beneath the vehicle; and he saw a huge surge of bubbles coming up from below. A type of seaweed surfaced about them, and it was all over the surrounding sea.

The sky was growing pale, and he saw that the sun was edging its way down to the sea, behind them.

The world looked surreal. The island had been like something out of a weird dream. He had never realized that things could change so much. He still believed that the world had been changed by some form of catastrophe – an ice age had to have occurred.

However, he believed that the creatures that had built the structures, and their ancestors, had appeared after it. Yet had any people actually survived? Yet he had not seen one life form on the island that he had recognized. Perhaps mankind had also changed. Perhaps civilization had eventually changed all the life on the world before the ice age?

Whatever it was, there must be clues somewhere. He rummaged through his memories, trying to discover something, from what he had seen on the island.

Many bright stars appeared in the darkening sky, and cold air replaced the warm air.

Burrell stood up, and he adjusted the remains of his clothing.

“I could do with something to eat!”

Dexter stretched out his arms, and yawned.

Basinger and Selina took out some food.

An odor, like roast pork, came to him, through the wind, and he rubbed his cold hands together. Then he grabbed a chunk of food, which he had kept, at his side.

He then went to where he had chosen to sleep, and the others moved to places.

Once he had finished chewing a morsel, which was in his mouth, he rested and went to sleep, feeling the slight movements of the vehicle.

A mysterious sound entered his light dream, and he realized that it was a voice – from the real world.

Blackness was all around him, and he felt Selina’s warm body, huddled around him.

Basinger’s loud snore came from somewhere else.

What had produced the sound? He gently lifted Selina’s head and shoulders from him, and he put her back down on some thick fur. The sound of the sea surging against itself grew, as he stood.

In the starlight at the front, he spotted Burrell pointing outwards into the dark. He went to him, without making any loud sounds.

“What is it?” Dexter spoke wearily, trying to observe what it was.

“It has not altered our course!”

“So what is it then?”

“There’s another island over there!”

Dexter stared, forcing his eyes to focus, and to adjust to the blackness, which was swallowing his sight. A faint outline became visible. It was so distant that he wondered if he could really see something.

“Do you want me to stay up …?”

“No, I will stay here! I like being here.”

“Thanks!” Dexter replied, returning to where he had been, feeling himself falling back asleep.

The vehicle was still rapidly going over the dark sea, when it became apparent that the region had a storm engulfing it. And Dexter once again realized that he might have made a mistake, and that he should have stayed on the island.

The whole sky about them was changing, and grew more menacing by the minute.

Thick clouds, with a firm winds, were edging in, to them.

The drizzle glowed, under the stars, and the wind picked up momentum.

Some faint streaks of light came from bright starlight, going through scattered clouds, and drizzle blanketed rugged waves. And the vehicle wildly rocked, and waves went up and down.

A dark mass of swirling clouds covered the sky, and it pelted them with large drops of rain.

The sun still had not ascended to the horizon, and the powerful storm was blasting through the dimness.

Dexter felt like slapping himself hard across the face for making such a blunder, and taking such a risk.

How much force could the small vehicle sustain?

His eyes searched the darkness, scanning for any signs of land, or if it was going to hit something, undetected by it, in the storm. Rain trickled through the windows, and poured in through the front. And a confounded rattle came from their loose objects banging into to each other about the floor. Then he saw another problem – all the water pouring in was swiftly making a pool, across his front.

Basinger and Burrell started using their hands to throw the water out of the vehicle, as it violently rocked about. And Dexter helped Selina to collect the loose objects on floor.

Basinger managed to get them to increase their pace, and they ignored the howling wind.

The outside grew dark, and it hid the blasting rain, pouring in, over them. Then lightning erupted, dazzling their eyes, as well as giving them a horrific fright with an extremely loud thunder roar.

As lightning continued erupting about them, it illuminated the soaked vehicle.

The thunder exploded over them, and Selina snatched Darwin out of the water, from the floor.

The lightning rhythmically flashed at different angles, about the sky, making the sea glow, and shadows of the vehicle shift about them.

At times he believed that he was definitely going to die, as they clung onto the vehicle, while massive waves pounded into it, and he could only hope that it had enough energy to sustain it. It was as though it would never go away, and that it would be impossible to survive.

Rain, wind, and coldness blasted at him. It flooded the vehicle, and made him numb, until he could not feel anything. Yet the long night, and final nightmare, subsided, leaving them in a thick mist.

His eyes roamed the deep cloud that they were left in, trying to recognize anything in it. The last gush of rain still streamed about the floor, shaking from the vibrations of the vehicle.

Slight turbulent winds occasionally rocked them, as they rested, and recovered from the incredible experience.

Burrell rested at the front, with his head facing downwards, out of the window, still trying to examine the way ahead.

Dexter felt himself going to sleep, and he realized that he could not properly see anything. The vehicle’s speed did not seem to have decreased, and the amount of energy in it had surprised him. However, he would not be happy until the mist cleared away, or thinned to a reasonable density, and they set foot on land.

Then, once again, something occurred – a thud came from the front, sending a shudder through the vehicle, knocking Burrell over, and onto the wet floor.

“What was that!” he yelled.

Where the mist thickened, and hid the sea behind it, a black shape slowly emerged. It loomed out of the sea, and it moved towards the edge of the vehicle, coming at their startled faces, like a sea monster.

Basinger moved across the floor to see it, and he leaned out, as it went by. And, as it disappeared, the others ran to the sides looking at it.

“What is it?” Burrell asked, confused.

A few seconds later, a shape moved out of the mist.

As the vehicle moved away, Dexter saw its shape a little more, and he was sure that it was a giant tower, which had fallen over, across the sea. The storms had probably sent it crashing down a long time ago. Yet how did it manage to get out in the sea?

As the mist grew thin, he saw another tower, up close – towering above them – disappearing into the clouds above.

Square holes went in lines along it, until it vanished out of view.

It was vaguely like a strange skyscraper. He saw a hole just over his head, but he was unable to get a good look inside it.

A magnificent view emerged about them, and many structures towered above, through the fading mist vapor, like an immense graveyard. They were flying over a city buried beneath the sea! Most of its giant structures had fallen over, with their foundations going across the water.

As he moved to a different position, he saw a rugged shape, on the skyline, where some mist was retreating. It had to be an island. Yet it seemed to stretch across the whole horizon.

The dead city was glowing brilliantly beneath the sea, with its towers reaching up, through the gentle waves.

In shades of aqua blue, it glowed surreally, suspended in depths of time, like a modern Atlantis. Its black structures rising high, stretching up to the stars, like the ancient columns of an immense temple of the Greek gods.

Even though many of them had overturned, like immense trees, fallen into the sea, with their lower regions going up to the height of large buildings, they remained undamaged. A magnitude of storms had pounded them, and they had no noticeable wear.

As the vehicle edged over the massive city, Dexter examined buildings and machines, shrouded in the red glow of the sun, which now was beaming down, through a clear sky. Some resembled shipwrecks, with the gentle waves making blurry ripples over their shapes.

A splash of water occasionally interrupted the extraordinary silence, as Basinger discarded unwanted objects over the side. Burrell and Selina rested in the warm light of the sun.

Darwin stood at his familiar position, at the side of the vehicle, with his legs on the seat, frequently tensing his body, as though he were getting ready to jump on land. He occasionally glanced into the water, and at the vehicle’s reflection, and then he would return to sniffing about him.

What type of city had it been? How did its civilization perish? Regions of it were as though they had actually sunk into the sea the way that they had been. A disaster, which might have changed the whole world, could have actually flooded it. However, he was sure that it had happened years after civilization had gone.

All the mist about them vanished, and the sea grew shallow.

He imagined the city surfacing, scattered in sand and debris, stretching out to the horizon, with steam rising from it, from the hot sun heating it.

“It’s the mainland!” Burrell called out. “This is what we were wanting – we’ll no longer be trapped on an island! If there are any humans left, we can at least find out what they are like …!”

“We may have to eat more sea creatures …!” Basinger said, interrupting him.

“We may find normal plants and animals, which were not on that island!”

“You have a point!” Basinger replied. “I actually think that we will be happy with what we will discover!”

Dexter watched part of the civilization below disappear into an area of murky water.

The region of land disappointed him, with its lack of vegetation. High mountains soared over a desert region, with the civilization, under the sea, in front of it. There were signs that the sea had overflowed, across the land, as though some enormous tidal wave had swept inland. However, he saw that the storm had not been there, and there were no traces of water.

When the vehicle finally went over the land, hot air started to engulf them, and Dexter realized that they had a new problem. The heat coming through the window soon felt as though it were burning him, and he watched the hot sand going under it. What had he done? They might now die in the desert. He quickly decided to move to a shaded place in the vehicle.

The hot air continued to rush through it, with its never-ending gale, and the sun blazed through the windows; and sweat poured from them.

He remembered the position of the sun, as accurately as he could, to plot its course.

He frantically observed the mountains, across the landscape, and he noticed that hills were replacing the flat desert. He imagined the power of the vehicle deteriorating, and he thought about all the things that they could do, if it marooned them at the place.

It looked as though an atomic bomb had exploded there.

He recalled information on how they gave the vehicle energy. There was a special location where a machine did it, without any cables.

The vehicle gradually took them up, at an angle, over hills and slopes, towards the base of the mountains. The region hidden there, between the hills and mountains, looked less empty than he had expected – for such a high place – ancient structures were at many places.

The rugged shapes of the mountains grew, and they went far into the distance. There was a route through the base of them, but he believed that something was blocking it. Then Dexter saw large hills of boulders strewn through it, which had obviously came down, in avalanches, from the above mountains.

The vehicle headed for a specific region, and Dexter just relaxed and watched the scenery float by. He wondered if the vehicle could actually take them up one of the steep ridges, to the summit of a mountain. However, it could easily run out of power, and plunge downwards.

A stretch of sand, which he believed was the remains of a lake, was between the mountains and the hills, and he saw a large structure in the middle of it. Then, to his surprise, the vehicle descended, and went towards it.

There were no signs of life anywhere, about it – there only seemed to be the desert.

The vehicle rapidly flew low, over the surface, and, with a soft thud, stopped on a heap of rubble. Then Darwin automatically leapt out onto some dry mud, and waited for them to join him.

There were no indications of anything, only an unusual silence. Yet every nook and cranny of the desert was strange!

Chapter 10

The Scientific Expedition

The flaring brightness of the sunshine gave a surreal splendor to the terrain, as Dexter tediously explored plots of vegetation. What he wanted to find was some form of vegetation that would provide them with temporary food.

A landscape of hills, of mounds of sand, went down into the lower regions, beside the sea.

It was a large flat ledge, on a slope, from a valley, between two searing mountains.

As they continued searching, Dexter noticed that instead of the pace slowing that it was actually quickening, and then Basinger and Burrell deliberately walked on, leaving them.

After a long search, he managed to suppress his hunger, as well as his thirst, and he and Selina returned to the vehicle, seeking shelter from the heat.

He, once again, searched the empty ground into the distance, all about him, looking for anything that was a danger.

“We’ve found a building all right!” Burrell spoke, as he arrived. “But will we be able to get into it?

“They are incredibly advanced …!” Basinger revealed. “The only problem will be how to get into its entrance, when we find its entrance!”

Dexter shrugged his shoulders, feeling happy that the choice of location might be right.

His first impression of it was that it was another structure, similar to the one that they had been staying in, on the island, but, as they walked to it, he started to become aware of its true size.

They separated into two groups, and wandered about its immense perimeter.

Dexter and Burrell went swiftly along the structure, which resembled a giant, black, metal box, and which went up to a hundred meters above.

Burrell then went away from him, and Dexter followed him with his eyes. He stopped at a dark patch of sand, at the edge of the structure, and he began throwing sand away from the side of the structure.

As he approached him, he recognized an outline on the structure, and he saw that he was unearthing an entrance.

He went around a dust cloud lingering in the air about him, and he stuck his hands into the gray sand and dirt, and he helped him dig it away.

They created loud sounds as they frantically dug at it, in the silent surroundings, which soon attracted Basinger’s attention. And they slowly came over to them, allowing them to do more digging before they got there.

They soon helped them to uncovering it, and they swiftly unveiled part of it.

“We may be able to get it open!” Basinger mumbled, breathing heavily, wiping away some of the dirt, from his face.

“How will we do it?” Burrell asked.

Basinger strained his tired eyes, examining him.

“Well, all of the other entrances had an opening mechanism, at the exact same position, relative to their size …!”

“There it is!” Dexter called out, and moved over to it.

He fumbled about in his pockets, removed part of a stick, and he inserted it into it.

The others moved away, as the ground began shaking under them. As it thudded furiously up and down, Dexter fell over, and he tightly held onto the ground, swearing to himself, for not foreseeing its reactions, to it being in the ground.

When the entrance slid open, he fell forwards, and just managed to land on his feet, and swiftly move out of the pile of dirt about him.

The dust cloud gradually dispersed, and a dim interior, with dark shapes, became visible.

“How are we going to find it?” Burrell asked, tiredly, as he dropped down, into it.

“We can stay here,” Basinger replied, “and search it at our leisure. We should be able to find enough food to survive …! Let’s start by finding somewhere in it to stay!”

It had fortunately not let in any water, which surprised Dexter. He wondered how they had stopped the airtight structures suffocating them, but he remembered that the other structure had an automatic ventilation machine, which worked when the oxygen was low.

He was unaware of how they could build such an immense structure. There were no noticeable parts making it up – it was one large structure – it looked as though they had molded it the way it was.

The structure was the same all over, with large machines randomly placed about it, and he located its furthest away corner, which had a rectangular shape next to it, which vaguely resembled a machine.

They circled the first machine, which he was sure was a lifting vehicle, with a squashed appearance. The controls were roughly the same as the vehicle that they had arrived in, but it seemed to have manual controls beside them.

The next machine, if it was a machine, left them in total disarray. Basinger was bewildered, and he was unable to confirm if it was the machine. Dexter had expected him to grasp its basic functions, but he could only examine it repeatedly, without recognizing anything.

Their tour of it proceeded, with them, including Darwin, giving blank stares about them. It did not take long before they just went to find a place to stay.

It was dim, but it was a good shelter, and they found lights.

Once they had chosen a place to stay, beneath a light, Basinger and Dexter went to find a way of lighting it.

“Is that it?” Burrell called out, pointing straight out, to the opposite wall, where Dexter saw a familiar shape.

The machine was identical to the information machine, and it had a head device on it, to Basinger’s great pleasure. And once Basinger had dived down in front of it, he soon had the lights on – putting the entire interior in a greenish glow.

Basinger put a projection onto the rear wall, and he began absorbing the information.

Once Dexter saw that its information was about the same, he left, to join the others.

“Is there power to recharge the vehicle?” Selina asked.

“I’ll have a look for it later …”

Suddenly, he realized Basinger was gone. Then he saw him eagerly removing dust from a large machine, at the other side of the structure, and Dexter briskly left towards him.

As he was approaching him, he gasped, when he clearly saw the machine.

“I got enough information about it …!” Basinger mumbled.

“My god! Did you recognize it …?”

“What …?”

“It’s the alien artifact – we found on Mars!”

Basinger looked at it amazed, and he walked around it, closely examining it, at different angles.

“It is not the same one. It’s one of the Star Chambers, identical to the diagram …!”

Basinger walked to the side of it, where he had been, and he played around with an unlocking mechanism on it.

“This control I believe should reveal more controls!”

A panel silently slid into the machine, revealing its complex controls.

Basinger’s hand gently touched a control, and Dexter barely kept his eyes open, not wishing to see what it would do. To his fascination, a shield slid away, from its central region, going into the machine, revealing a deep darkness. Then he looked upon the blanket of blackness in disgust, wanting to edge away from it, but it did not seem to be a genuine danger. The machine seemed to be in control of it. It had no protection screen over it, yet there was no pull from it. It was stable, and it covered the entire area of the inner chamber.

“Why is the inside of it actually different …?” Burrell asked Basinger.

“From the information I got from the machines, I would say that the one at the laboratory had been left on, and it lost most of its power. The black hole would have formed in it, from the entrance curtain, over the chamber. It collapsed into its original state, and one of the machine’s safety devices was holding it, at the machine. In the right circumstance not even the safety devices could stop it escaping from it!”

“Why are there so many controls?”

“They are different destinations …!”

“Will the other machines be working?”

“They may be!”

Dexter avoided saying any more on the subject, and he wondered just what he was planning on doing.

A dim view of something lit up on a screen, at the top of the controls.

“This gives a view of the other side of the black hole!”

Basinger pressed the first of the hundreds of location buttons, at the top of them, and the screen partially lit, in dim shades. They viewed it at different perspectives. The light slightly vibrated, and he began to understand what it was.

He held his hands apart, in front of his eyes, over the screen.

“Is that daylight? Could that be where it is passing through?” Dexter presumed, looking at specks floating about, in the beams of light.

“It’s underwater!” Basinger continued.

“It must be at this side of the world – the sun is out!”

Basinger pressed another button, and he saw dirt and rocks dimly light, in a green shade, from light going into it.

“We can use this to transport ourselves about the world!” Basinger explained. “And we can properly explore it. The other machines will have lots of other destinations!”

“Do you want to push something into it,” Burrell enquired, “to see what happens?”

Dexter knew where there was a pole, which could be detached from one of the machines, and he went straight to it, and got it.

Basinger eagerly returned to the machine, with him, and Dexter put it into it.

It felt strange, as though the magnetic properties of something had caught it, and there were no signs of any time derangements. The end of it then hit something, which was the ground surrounding the machine at the other end.

“Do you want to try the other controls?”

“They only adjust some of its basic functions.”

“Let’s see some more of its destinations!”

The first controls activated more buried machines, but then the interior of a small structure appeared, which had light entering it from a slightly open entrance.

“If that machine is not working properly,” Dexter enquired, “will we be able to return here?”

“You pushed the pole through, and it came back through!” Burrell answered.

Dexter shrugged his shoulders, and just smiled.

“But the top of the pole is missing!” Basinger replied, showing them the top of it missing.

“You said nothing could break that material!”

“Good, it has the ability of virtually stopping everything, from coming through it – if you don’t open it at the other end, to return. I am positive that the other machines will be working, if their shields open!”

Dexter wondered what Basinger was going to do next.

“I am going through …!” Basinger suddenly volunteered.

“How about us searching for a better location first?” Dexter pleaded. “It would not take that long to search through them! If you cannot activate it, to get back here, it may leave you trapped in a desert!”

“No!” Basinger grunted, and he unhesitatingly plunged into its blackness.

Chapter 11

The Star Chambers

The dark city shapes of the sunken city rapidly illuminated, beneath the morning sky, as the sun elevated.

Dexter observed the sun reflect from the sea, in sparkling shapes.

He started eating his morning ration of food, as he stood at the edge of the entrance.

As he turned, the machine’s shield sprang open, at lightning speed, and Basinger instantly leapt out of it.

Dexter swiftly ran to where he was, and he managed to close the shield on the other machine, before Basinger could get to it. Then he changed it to another destination.

“There are worse dangers at the other side of the world than in your wildest fantasies!”

“What happened?” Burrell asked loudly.

Basinger held his side, and he took in a lungful of air, calming himself.

“Once I got through the entrance, I found that it was a small structure, in the middle of a swamp – the strangest swamp I have ever seen –

“I was attempting to locate where it was – and why nothing resembled anything I had seen – but I got lost …! It was buried, and the exit was too small, and hidden away! The stench of gases, stuck in my lungs … I was going in circles, and I could not find it …

“Then the land that I was on, next to some water ditches, lifted, and I saw everything shifting up …!

“A head, almost double my height, appeared from beneath the water! The thing threw me out of its way, and in the water!

“After a long slog through the swamp, I climbed up a hill, and I saw the shape of where the structure was! Yet, as I rushed back, the sky rapidly darkened, and I heard some of the most ghastly, goddam sounds. I don’t know what some of the things, beasts, were, but hundreds of them started appearing everywhere!”

Dexter listened, horrified that the world was inhabited by monsters, beyond his imagination.

“Surely that cannot be correct!” Burrell replied dazed. “Why have we not seen any beasts – the size that you described?”

“The same reason that you didn’t get lions and elephants on other continents, or on islands!”

“Are you sure that you did not travel in time?” Selina asked.

“I am sure …! The information machine gave me facts, which told me that it is not a time machine! We will just have to check the destinations better, and, perhaps, draw a map of where we can go!”

The destination controls made many shades of soil appear on the screen, and then a view of a gap, going out of the ground, emerged.

Basinger grabbed the pole, and he pushed it into it. Then Dexter watched some rocks fall away, revealing a valley, from the side of a hill.

“It must be near here,” Selina declared, “as the sun is almost in the same position as here! Let’s try to get through, to try it?”

“We may not be able to get back!” Dexter answered. “If it is buried in something – we would have to dig it up! We have to do this right – this machine could be dangerous …!”

He swiftly began to activate the controls. Most of the views were now dark, and he tried to see if they were in structures. For some time, they just stared at the screen, as he rhythmically pressed the controls.

A blur of light appeared, which was underwater, and something about it grabbed his attention – it somehow seemed familiar – for some reason. He could not identify it, and he saw Selina’s antics – signaling to him to move on – and he proceeded at a slow pace. Some hot desert places appeared on it, and they were not worth investigating.

Halfway through them, the others grew tired of standing at it, and they left to get some food. Dexter then put the underwater view back on the screen. It was as though he were seeing something he had dreamt.

He thought of every underwater place he had recently seen, and he froze, in shock, and he barely breathed.

A strange shiver went through him, and he swiftly changed the destination, to where it had been. He desperately wanted to inform them where he believed it was, but they would not believe it. He barely believed that it was possible.

He then realized that it did not make sense. The view on the screen had to be only reminding him of the bottom of the pool, outside the cave tunnel, at the top of the cliff. However, he was sure that he had seen something there, in the depths of it, even though he had not noticed that it had been a machine.

What had been there, at the island, and in the pool, and why did he sense that it had saved them?

Selina strolled towards him, and he desperately tried to hide his startled looks.

“Here’s some food!”

He took the food, and he chewed large bits out of it, as he tried to think of a way to check it. He might not be able hold his breath long enough, to activate the machine, to return. He could put himself in great danger, or be stuck there.

He just put his hand out, and he put the view on it again.

“What is it?” Selina murmured, glaring at him.

Without any explanations, he just leapt into its blackness, as he was sure that he could do it, and it went past his head like a black line. And he swam up through the water, to where light beamed down.

He leaped through the surface of the water, and he crawled onto an embankment.

As he cleaned the water from his eyes, he saw some of the animals that they had left at the pool, jumping back from him, as they saw him.

It was incredible, he had thought that he would ever see the cave again, but it had been his intention to return.

As he rested, he wondered if he had condemned himself to be stuck at it for the rest of his life. Yet he knew where he was, and where the others were. Moreover, all he needed to do was find a way to drain the pool.

While he tested his breathing, proving that it was about normal, he stood. But as he was about to dive, he remembered the lifting device. He had to try it first, even though its powers might not be enough. The rewards for getting it to the surface would be outstanding.

Once he had it, he practiced using it, and he dived into the water, as fast as he possibly could. If he could swim down fast enough, he might have enough oxygen left. The pool seemed to go endlessly down, but he swam fast and furiously into it. As it grew very dim, the bottom finally appeared beneath him.

He frantically searched, trying to find the machine, but it was not visible to him. However, he recalled where it had been, and he found it. Then he traced its shape into the mud.

Dexter swiftly activated a control, and his height increased, dragging up a tremendous weight beneath him, including the mud and water, surrounding the machine. Even though he had activated the control that made it swiftly lift, it only was capable of taking him up at a gradual pace.

His lungs began to lust for air, and he thought he was going to die. But he saw the surface over him. Then the water rushed away, and he gasped for air.

He was soon lying on a layer of water, on the ground, with the machine next to him.

Selina appeared at his side, and he saw that the water had stopped pouring off the machine.

“What did you do?” Burrell moaned, as he approached him.

Dexter coughed furiously, and rested.

“We’re back at the cave!” Basinger explained, in amazement. “And the animals are here!”

Dexter smiled, and he nodded rhythmically.

He had never seen them so troubled for an explanation.

Basinger and Burrell then strolled into the cave, looking baffled, and Selina stayed with him.

She cleaned some of the mud from the machine, with water.

Basinger and Burrell congratulated him, when they returned, with the things that they needed, and they quickly left, to get some precious food supplies.

There was a large amount of things that they needed from the island, and they would have to keep making trips to it. They had not found anywhere else to get proper food.

However, they had not seen that many destinations. And the machine, in front of him, would have destinations on it that were not on other.

The next morning, Dexter helped Basinger check more locations, on the machine at the structure.

Dexter carefully marked down the locations that they were able to go to, and what he saw at the places, which were mostly deserts and rocky locations.

Basinger did not know why another swamp region had not appeared. He eventually returned to the information machine, where he sat captivated, trying to find details on various things.

Dexter examined the locations on the machine, and he would remove them from the list if he realized that they were too dangerous, or if he might not be able to return – especially if the machine looked as though it was in a place that might have damaged it.

He finally decided that it was time to check the machine at the cave, and he went to it.

After only checking a few destinations on it, a dark green shade appeared, and he realized that it was a type of forest. And he marked it down as a possible source of food for them. He then closely examined the types of soil at various locations about the world.

Then a spectacular whiteness illuminated at one destination, and he saw that it was ice and snow. And he wondered why the snow had not covered the machine, or why it had not been in a glacier, and he decided to investigate it.

A bitter breeze hit his face, as he swiftly walked through, onto crunching snow. And an unusual sight opened out behind him, where he had only expected to see the sun beaming brightly. A hill of square stones went out for about half a mile, of the remains of a stone structure.

What confused him was that the machine was out in the open – and not under the stones. There were no indications why the machine was there. However, it might have been in part of the structure that had deteriorated away, over the many years, by the harsh winter conditions. Its remaining parts had to be under him, and the weather must have destroyed it.

Then he noticed that there was an area missing from the stones, as though the machine had been in the stones.

He was sure that it was a sort of observation point, to check the region, and that it was at the edge of a polar region. He was sure, by the fact that the structure was not under the ice, that the world now had a stable climate.

At the controls of the machine, he touched a control, and it reversed the black hole. The brilliant whiteness vanished, as he went back through, and the dim surroundings of the cavity engulfed him.

He was about to activate the controls of the machine at a fast pace, as there were many destinations under the ground appearing on the screen, when he saw a faint shape, within one. When he closely examined it, he did not see anything else. However, since the faint light that was about him that was traveling into the machine was not bright, he waited for the sun to appear from behind a cloud.

Then, when the sun flashed, he saw a room.

When he entered it, he instantly smelt a deep stale odor, and rapidly proved he could breath it.

Then he spotted speckles in the darkness! And he moved further in, and realized that he was glaring out at the stars of deep space.

Chapter 12

The Gateway to the Stars

A blue radiance shone so dimly, through a crack in its structure, that he knew that he would not normally have seen it. He surely would have mistaken it for a reflection, but, in his alert state, he positively recognized it.

His emotions had been running amok, seeing the spectacular view of space, in the darkness; and they were nothing compared to the eerie sensations that were now gripping him. He sensed a presence, as though the entity from the pool was nearby, and he was sure that it had to be at the blueness.

Was this place associated with the mysterious things that had happened on the island? Why had the civilization left a spaceship in space? Had their civilization advanced so far that they had been able to leave spaceships all over space? There were not any signs of the world, and he was sure that it was traveling through the stars.

He tenderly approached the crack, exiting into something, which created a vague beam of blueness. He could not imagine what it could be – what would live here, in this barn place? A desolate spaceship, left out in the depths of space, endlessly trapped …

An entrance became visible, where the crack was, and he gripped and pulled its shape, until it finally opened, revealing another interior, full of beaming blue controls.

Had mankind actually traveled to the stars? What had they found in space? Had it destroyed mankind …?

He accepted the truth – the creatures had been aliens!

Had mankind contacted them, or had they found them? Had these things killed every last human? Yet they surely would have recorded it, somewhere …

He continued his search, through the controls, looking for anything familiar, daring not to touch anything. Gradually, he backed away, and went back into the other room.

While he was entering the machine, he wondered if the spaceship was actually traveling through another galaxy, on a voyage to somewhere.

Basinger only slightly accepted his explanation of what the civilization had been, and he continued to work, at the machine.

“Do you think that these creatures invaded the world?” Burrell replied.

“I do not know what they did, but I know that they are aliens, and I was in one of their spaceships …!”

“You were in a spaceship!” Selina exclaimed, and they stared at him.

“Yes, and I have news for you – they were aliens …!”

“My god!” Burrell shrieked.

“What did they do to the human race?” Dexter pleaded.

“Calm down,” Basinger replied, “there is no evidence that anything happened! There will be a logical explanation! Do not forget how long ago mankind was here. We have not found one piece of evidence that indicates that mankind even existed. The information might have been lost in the depths of time! This race was too logical to destroy an entire race of beings! Their information suggests that they mostly ate plants. I am going to get to the bottom of this if it takes me the rest of my life!”

“What type of world do you think they are from?” Selina muttered.

Dexter shrugged his shoulders, and he looked at the structure differently.

“Well, I would like to see this alien spaceship …!” Basinger spoke, walking towards him. “Technology was progressing at a very fast pace when we left … Think of how far mankind could have advanced in the amount of time it probably existed …!”

“Let’s see this alien spaceship!” Burrell stated.

Dexter held out his arm and bowed, and they stared at him, with worried looks.

Once at the cavity, they examined the dark screen, with interest.

“Why is it dark?” Burrell gasped. “Is there no lights on in it?”

Dexter ignored him, and he walked into the machine.

Once inside the spaceship, he stood at the edge of the machine, and he examined the faint rays coming through, out of the blackness; then something distorted them, and Basinger’s figure magically appeared from its blackness, with his eyes bulging out, as he tried to see about him. He then moved himself about, as he felt the lighter artificial gravity.

Once the others had entered, they stayed silent, and listened to a distant hum. Then Dexter took them to the window, where they stood glaring out at the stars of the universe.

Basinger’s thirst for knowledge was increasing, and he insisted in checking the other locations, while Dexter watched; and the others went to get food. Dexter saw the same type of places randomly appear, and he no longer thought that the machine would have any more good destinations. He could not understand why it had a spaceship as one of its destinations, and it was not on the other machine. However, he was sure that they had mainly used it for transporting goods, to the island.

“Why are we trying this machine …?” he finally asked Basinger.

“We have checked the other one …!”

“Yes, but that other one was for transporting goods, and this one was probably used by the inhabitants of the island.”

“Of course, it would be better to try the machine on the spaceship!”

“Think of the destinations that it would have …!”

As he stepped into it, he noticed again that the air in the spaceship was weak.

The first destinations were disappointedly similar to the other machines, but a surreal sight lit up, and he saw that it was another world.

“Where is that …?” Basinger gasped, as he saw it.

“I would say it was another world!” he answered, into the confines of the dark spaceship.

“They visited other worlds! This thing actually traveled to other worlds!”

“You might already have visited one of them – when you first entered that machine – that swamp you told us about.”

“My god!”

A yellow cloud of gas floated by the screen, with a surreal motion, and a creature like a jellyfish drifted through it. The air and world looked too deadly, and they avoided making any statements about going to it.

The Dexter activated control after control, and strange landscapes appeared. Their colors and shapes were unpredictable, and they did not move as he pressed a new one.

By the amount of worlds that he had seen, he knew that the aliens must have traveled incredible distances. At any moment, he expected an alien civilization to appear on it, but there were no traces of any civilizations on the machine. They seemed to be exploration places, or places that they had chose to go to for other reasons. He was beginning to believe that mankind might have been one of the few civilizations that they had found. Yet had they found the remains of mankind, years after its extinction?

There were hundreds, and they were speechless by the time they got to the last. Basinger looked as though he was getting ready to argue with him, if he suggested going to any of them. Yet Dexter was sure that most of the worlds were so deadly that they would not be able to survive on them without spacesuits and weapons, and that they needed time to consider them.

As he was thinking of how many other worlds there were on the other Star Chambers, an unusual view appeared on the screen. It remained there, and they moved their heads about at different angles trying to see what it was. Eventually Dexter went close to it, and he took a proper look at it. It seemed to be in some type of structure. Basinger put out his hand to press another button, and Dexter grabbed it, tightly holding him away from it.

“What is it …?”

“There are lights on in it!”

“It will be some type of machine that has remained running on solar power, or something!”

Dexter disagreed, and he moved his head from side to side.

He sensed something, and he knew that he had to check it.

“I am going into it!”

“You better take a weapon with you?”

“I’ll not need one!”

“What do you mean …? Why do you not need it? Anything could be hiding there?”

“I want to do this the right way!”

As he leapt through, a place like a tomb became visible about him, and he watched the machine, making sure that Basinger was not following him.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw yellow globes of light dimly lighting a narrow corridor, like dull candle flames.

At a distant region of it, it abruptly darkened, where the lights did not go any further, and he saw that it was the corridor of something, with the machine at the end of it.

The gravity felt the same as the spaceship, which meant that the aliens had built it.

A low buzz sound emerged, from somewhere in front of him, and he realized that he was in another spaceship. He temporally doubted his senses; but a spaceship would have enough power to keep its lights going – the lights on the controls in the other spaceship proved it. The size of this one seemed immense, with its corridor going on endlessly into it.

The lights vanished, and he walked into the darkness.

An open entrance finally appeared in it.

He went through it, not seeing where he was going, and, with a thud, his side hit something. In amazement, he then saw that he was not just in darkness – a large translucent dome surrounded him, and his entire sight was full of stars.

It obviously was an observation point of a starship. The black floor was a barely visible line below him, and he felt what he had hit – its shape suggested that it was a type of seat.

After he had finished feeling its rough texture, he rested on it, and he stared out into space.

Suddenly, a clang came from behind him, giving him a fright – making him instinctively jerk forward – and he realized that he was not alone. He was positive that it had been an unintended noise, and he gently lifted himself up, making faint brushing sounds. And as he moved towards it, he started to sweat.

In the dim starlight, he saw a closed entrance, on a wall, beside the entrance that he had come in, which had a material on it that almost hid it. He carefully removed a stick out of his pocket, and gently inserted it into a hole at its side, and it silently opened, revealing a dark interior – with the dark figure of a being. Yet, as his sight adjusted, he recognized its shape.

Basinger virtually jumped into the air, when he heard him.

“What are you doing here?” he cried out.

“This is where I arrived – through that entrance! You have to see the observation room that’s in there!”

“Show me!” he grumbled, while calming himself, as he closely examined him.

“I’ll show you!”

“Where in the hell is this?” he gasped, as he walked through to the observation room. “Why are there two of the machines?”

“They might have been transporting it to another world!”

They stood silently, watching a light streak by, across the stars.

“How fast do you think this thing is traveling at?” Dexter asked.

“It is fast enough to get quickly to other worlds! What I want to know is where in the heck it is! If this thing has been traveling through space since the aliens of the civilization existed, it may be many galaxies away, in the distant depths of the universe, traveling forever into infinity!”

“How do you think they got their food?”

“I am going back to the others!”

“Do you want to check the rest of the destinations first?”

“Okay!”

When Dexter got to the machine, he activated a control, and a moon appeared.

“Why is that there? All the others were worlds!” Basinger spoke, from behind him.

“Could have had something that they had an interest in – perhaps for mining?”

Another world lit up, and he was sure that he now knew why some of the worlds were on it – they had to have things on them that they had needed – they were not colony worlds.

Basinger started to get ready to leave, as they approached the last controls, and Dexter suddenly saw surreal blue shades wavering about, in patterns of whiteness. Their colors gave away their identities – as the reflections of water. In the brightness, he saw a flat shape, which was obviously an artificial floor.

He stared intensely at it, and Basinger shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, what is it then?”

“I don’t know, but its color is identical to the sea, back on the world!”

“So what?”

“It may be useful – if it’s a structure – if it’s on the world?”

“If you want to check it, please proceed …!”

Dexter just stared, and he walked towards it.

The darkness swiftly turned to blinding light, and a type of dome, made of a translucent material, became visible over him, which had brightly lit water over it, sending reflections all about him. The distorted shapes of the sun seemed magnified.

He was in a globular bulge of transparent material, connected to a translucent tunnel, which went on and on into the distance.

Stars shone below him, as he clumsily rested, and he realized that he had been mistaken – he was not on the world – he was over the world. Its sphere was shining in space, at the side of him. It was completely different, and he could barely believe that it was the world.

He was on some form of space station, with a tremendous size, stretching out for miles all about him, in networks of translucent tunnels, with large round and square bulges.

After a long time, of observing it, he returned to the machine, and made his way back to the spaceship.

Basinger was gone, and he blindly searched for him. He wondered why he had left. Then he saw the entrance to the control room at a different position than it had been.

At his approach to it, he saw something strange in its blueness, but the intense brightness to blackness was still affecting his sight.

Yet, amidst the blur, he saw a large sphere rotating at the center of the room, and Basinger’s head was faintly visible behind a machine. He was at a machine that he had not noticed before, at the opposite wall, in the darkness that was there. He was sure it was an information machine.

“You have an early view of the world there!” Dexter explained, looking at the hologram image of the world, floating in air. “I just saw a recent view of it from space!”

“No, you never …!” he called out, frantically shaking his head from side to side, as he lifted a head device from his head.

“What …?”

“This is not the Earth! I should have realized it …!”

“What have you realized?”

“We have been on another world!”

“What …?”

“From this machine’s star charts, I gather that the Earth is in another universe!”

The spaceship’s technology was incredible, and it had the most advanced and last records of the super-species who had eventually completely replaced the aliens. Their territory had spanned galaxies, and then universes …

Their knowledge was immense, and his mind could barely understand most of their information. They used the Star Chambers to keep their civilization connected, over the immense expanses of space.

Dexter sat, in its blue glow, with his head facing a patterned screen, listening to its silent hum. He took the head device away from his head, and he placed it into darkness, at the side of the machine.

Basinger sat thinking, probably about how to use the newly found knowledge.

“Did you get any information about why the black hole put us at the island?” Dexter asked him, watching his head glow, in the surrounding dimness.

“From the information that I have taken, I would say that the black hole connected to the nearest open black hole, from the damaged Star Chamber. With it being damaged, especially when it entered the laboratory, and we were pulled into it, it would not have been able to connect properly with the other Star Chambers, and we might have ended up in a natural black hole, somewhere. Perhaps at the center of a galaxy!”

“Or we might have traveled on endlessly into infinity! The last of the aliens might have deliberately left the black hole at the island, over the water there, to prevent such occurrences happening!

“Is there anyway to link a Star Chamber to that black hole back on Earth?”

Basinger’s eyes glared for a second, as though he had just been thinking about it.

“I do not know …!”

“How did the aliens connect them to each other?”

“I only know that they connected some on this world, and took them to their destinations.”

“At least, we have a transporter, which can take us all over that world, and to other worlds, if we become tired of this one. There must be thousands – or millions, in other universes – with valuable locations. On all the machines! We could be searching them for the rest of our lives!”

Dexter rested against a wall, on the badly shaped seat, and he placed a head device over his head, and activated it.

Basinger leisurely switched on a lever.

A projection beamed out of the machine, and the hologram world lit up in the air, at his front, and a vivid green diagram appeared over it, marking regions on it. Dexter tried to see where the island was, on it.

Basinger finally left, and Dexter decided to continue his search of the destinations, and he chose to check the other machine, at the end of the corridor.

He began by automatically pressing controls, and ignoring views of soil, searching for any signs of structures. His speed gradually increased, and his hand rhythmically went from control to control, as images swiftly appeared and vanished.

An image on the screen stuck in his mind, and he once again activated it. In a murky view of some location, he made out a perfect shape, and he was about to forget the meaningless sight, but he saw that there were no signs of soil, and he then caught a glimpse of a faint square shape, shifting wildly about. It was dark, but he was positive that he had found a destination with a damaged Star Chamber, with a black hole formed in it.

The familiar pattern of movements fascinated him!

Dexter was tired, and left it, realizing that it was night at the location, and that he might be able to see something on it when it was daylight at the location.

When he returned the next morning, to continue his search, he instantly observed that the location on the screen was now brightly lit, and vibrating furiously, in a blur of many images.

Yet though it was bright, it was not daylight – artificial lights beamed over it – and, to his great delight, he saw an image of the laboratory, spin through the frenzy of images.

Chapter 13

Destination: Earth

An extraordinary scene developed before Dexter, as he landed on the floor of the chamber. A mass of shuffling, activities, and flickering lights erupted about him, and he ignored cries of shouting and mumbling voices.

Dexter leapt over to his side, and the others came through, behind him, drawing away the attention of the crowd, from him, and he was able to see them properly.

How could he have been so unlucky? The entire laboratory was full of reporters and television crews. Had they actually expected their arrival? He had expected the opposite!

The laboratory looked the same, except for the screen, which was a more dense material. The crowd, behind it, watched them, with profound amusement, unable to believe what was in front of them. They occasionally cracked jokes, and loudly laughed, while they desperately filmed them.

Basinger observed himself and them, at different angles, and he shrugged. Selina held her ears, to ignore the racket.

Dexter imagined the media, and public, remembering them, the way they were, forever – as the scientific expedition that returned from the famous black hole as savages – dressed in bits of alien animal skins, and covered in muck, sand, and bits of creatures.

He felt as though he were Robinson Crusoe returning to civilization. He barely understood their reactions to things. How had he changed so quickly? Their cleanliness was unbelievable! Would they actually accept what had taken place – and that they had come from another world – and that they had stayed in the remains of a futuristic alien civilization, in another universe?

Professor Bergman finally appeared, and he pushed his way through the crowd. Then he stood glaring, in utter amazement, and confusion, at them, and Basinger repeatedly shrugged his shoulders, with embarrassment.

Professor Bergman rushed back through the crowd, and he ordered his assistants about.

They gradually drew the crowd away, and they started setting up equipment, to check the black hole. They finally opened an entrance to the chamber, at the side of the screen, and anxiously ushered them out.

“What happened …?” Professor Bergman cried out.

Basinger lifted his hands up, exasperated, and he let them fall to his side. Burrell and Selina laughed, and Dexter laughed more uncontrollably than he could remember doing, and he decided that he was going to let someone else explain.

“Why was the media here …?” Selina asked.

Professor Bergman observed her, for a few seconds.

“We thought that the black hole might disperse, after its appearance had altered – and the media had a fascination in it. What information have you discovered about it?”

“You will not need a protection screen around it anymore!” Burrell muttered. “It will not pull anything into it anymore …!”

Professor Bergman looked at him, as though he were mad, and he touched a piece of animal fur on his shoulder.

“What in the blazes is that?”

A technician, at the door, came over, and he examined it.

“May we take this …?”

“You can have all of it – once I have put on some proper clothes!”

“Do you want these as well …?” Dexter asked, taking out a handful of bits of vegetation.

“What are they?” the technician muttered, examining their peculiar features.

“They are seeds!” Dexter replied, handing him the seeds, from the jungle. “Can you have them grown, and, if possible, tell me why some of them shift about?”

“Yes!” the technician replied firmly, confused.

“Look …!” Burrell called out.

The black hole vibrated, as though something was coming through.

Then, as its movements stopped, Dexter saw a strange blur in front of it, which vanished into it. Then the black hole started contracting, until it no longer existed.

“How did that happen?” Basinger grumbled.

Dexter realized why, from the spaceship’s information, but he never said anything, because it had been the entity, and the last of what some of the super-species had advanced into, before their new species had completely annihilated itself.

The Black Hole Accelerator X3

A classic SF thriller with two SF action thriller stories! A leading intelligence agent investigates scientists in the depths of the moon creating a stargate after time warps and forms of black holes are created in particle accelerators in space, and scientists find an alien sphere on Mars and reveal it is suspending a form of black hole and accidentally enter its confines and enter a mind-boggling universe!
Particle Accelerator X3
Deep in the depths of the moon scientists have been carrying out some of the greatest and most dangerous research experiments attained! A secret agent is sent in on an ultimate mission! Leading people and scientists are being killed everywhere and nobody knows why!
There are hidden confidential moonbases doing research on something colossal and mind-blowing and nobody knows what!
Scientists create a stargate after time warps and new forms of black holes are created in particle accelerators in space, and nobody knows what their deadliest technology will create and do next! Reports claim there is an ultimate weapon capable of destroying entire worlds! Has it been created to destroy a dangerous alien civilization and threat as part of a real Star Wars program?
Scientists carry out experiments on the colossal stargate, gateway to the stars, and at an exhibition of it an accident occurs and the intelligence agent enters it and travels out beyond the realms of the universe, and hurtles through a mind-bending gateway through galaxies!
The Alien Sphere
Scientists discover a mysterious metallic sphere with a pulsating vibration on Mars and open it to reveal its forces are suspending a black hole, and while carrying out experiments on it accidentally enter its confines and travel out beyond space and time into a mind-boggling universe!